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We on Earth get to take in the wonder of a meteor shower typically when our planet passes through the trail of a comet. The bits of rock and debris burn up when they hit Earth’s dense atmosphere, and streak across the sky.

But the Geminid meteor show — which will reach its peak Wednesday night and early Thursday morning — is not typical.

If you go outside Wednesday night and watch, you’ll be seeing bits of debris from an asteroid named 3200 Phaethon burn up in the night sky.

The asteroid is small — just 3 miles wide — and rocky. It also behaves much more like a comet than an asteroid.

While asteroid orbits tend to be more round, 3200 Phaethon has a highly elliptical orbit like a comet. But more importantly for the meteor shower, 3200 Phaethon is a rare asteroid that forms a tail.

This is likely due to its orbit, which brings it very close to the sun (in Greek mythology, Phaethon is the son of Helios, the sun god). The heat of the sun fractures the rock and creates the trail of debris that the Earth is about to barrel through. For this reason, 3200 Phaethon is sometimes referred to as a “rock comet.”

What’s more, those asteroid bits are denser than typical meteor kindling, which means they move more slowly across the sky as they burn. They also tend to be a bit brighter than the typical meteor. “The brightest often break up into numerous luminous fragments that follow similar paths across the sky,” the Royal Observatory Greenwich explains in its guide to the night sky.

All of this makes the Geminids “the best and most reliable of the annual meteor showers,” usually producing around 120 meteors an hour at peak, NASA notes.

And Wednesday night should be especially good for viewing: The moon will be a thin, waning crescent that won’t rise until 3:30 am and will only give off off dim light that shouldn’t obscure the meteors.

The constellation Gemini — out of which the Geminids appear to radiate — will rise in the Northeast in the early evening, and then by midnight, will be nearly directly overhead in the Southwestern sky, before setting in the West around daybreak. When Gemini is nearly overhead all you have to do to spot these meteors is look up (a star-spotting app like SkyGuide is helpful for knowing exactly where to look and when where you live). You should be able to see some meteors in the early evening hours after dark, but the most meteors will be visible from midnight to 4 am, NASA explains.

“The Geminids will be the best shower this year,” Bill Cooke, a NASA meteor scientist, said in a press release.

Further reading:

Former Russia probe investigator Peter Strzok’s texts have been released and they’re stirring up controversy.

A senior FBI counterintelligence official who had until recently been part of special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation spent months sending text messages to a colleague in the run-up to the 2016 election that derided President Donald Trump as a “douche,” an “utter idiot,” and a “loathsome human.”

The release of the texts from Peter Strzok, who had led the FBI’s investigation of Hillary Clinton’s private email server before joining the Russia probe, is giving new ammunition to Mueller’s conservative critics. The Trump defenders say the texts provide clear evidence that the former FBI chief isn’t running an impartial probe — and should be removed from his post.

The texts first came to light in early December, when the New York Times reported that Mueller had ousted Strzok after learning of the anti-Trump messages. Strzok, who was removed in late July, had sent the messages to an FBI lawyer, Lisa Page.

But the specific content of those messages wasn’t known until Tuesday night, when the Justice Department took the highly unusual step of sharing them with Congress and a set of reporters, despite the fact that Strzok is still being investigated by the Justice Department’s internal watchdog.

The roughly 375 text messages show Strzok and Page sharing harsh criticisms of Trump and strong support for Clinton. The messages start in mid-2015 and continue until weeks after the election.

For example, in an exchange in March 2016, Strzok wrote, "God Hillary should win 100,000,000 - 0."

Page replied to Strzok later, “Also did you hear [Trump] make a comment about the size of his dick earlier? This man can not be president.”

The text messages have enraged Republican lawmakers and conservative pundits, who see them as evidence that Mueller’s probe has been tainted by partisan bias.

And the news comes at a convenient time for them, as it discredits Mueller’s probe just as the investigation is ramping up criminal charges against Trump’s associates.

The text messages are giving Trump’s defenders new ammo

During a House Judiciary Committee hearing on Wednesday, Republican chairman Bob Goodlatte (VA) said that the texts showed “extreme bias” against Trump, and were “deeply troubling.”

However, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, the only official in the Justice Department with the authority to fire Mueller, said during the hearing he was “not aware” of Mueller acting inappropriately and he saw no good cause to dismiss him.

But the conservative media world isn’t convinced, and it devoted a great deal of airtime to the Strzok text messages on Wednesday, especially a string of enigmatic texts in which Strzok says “I’m afraid we can’t take that risk” while apparently alluding to the prospect of Trump’s election.

A Brietbart writer said the texts point to “a potential idea to thwart Trump’s election,” and the Daily Caller wrote that the text exchanges show potential plans to “prevent Donald Trump from being elected president.” Fox News’ Martha MacCallum said the texts hint at “some sort of poison pill perhaps or something to protect the country from what they see as what’s coming.”

This only adds to the enormous controversy swirling around Strzok in conservative circles. Earlier in December CNN revealed that when he led the FBI’s investigation of Clinton's private email server, he changed how then-FBI Director James Comey publicly described her behavior from “grossly negligent” to “extremely careless” in a draft memo. That change had the effect of softening Comey’s criticism of Clinton at a particularly sensitive time in the 2016 campaign, and may have shielded her from charges of criminal conduct.

The scandal comes as the Mueller probe reaches deeper into Trump’s inner circle. The special counsel has already charged four people — two of whom pleaded guilty, including former national security adviser Michael Flynn. Multiple reports suggest Trump’s son-in-law and top adviser Jared Kushner could be the next target. Plus, it appears Mueller is building a case that Trump himself may have obstructed justice.

And that’s why the Strzok controversy is so important. Trump’s defenders are trying to build a public case for firing the special counsel — and for defending the president afterwards. If Trump decides to one day pull the trigger, expect to hear Peter Strzok’s name bandied about as one of the reasons why.

Black women voted overwhelmingly against Roy Moore. Feminism has to recognize their leadership.

To some, the results of Tuesday night’s Alabama special election might look like a victory for #MeToo.

Roy Moore, a man accused of sexually pursuing, abusing, or assaulting multiple teenage girls, was defeated by Doug Jones in an unexpected upset, sending an Alabama Democrat to the Senate for the first time in 25 years.

But the lessons of Tuesday night are more complicated than that. According to exit polls, 63 percent of white women voted for Moore — a reminder of last year’s presidential election, when 53 percent of white female voters cast their ballots for a man caught on tape talking about grabbing women “by the pussy.”

The Alabama special election demonstrated, once again, that many white women are quite willing to vote for a man accused of sexual assault, and that the idea of women as a unified voting bloc is sorely misguided. It also showed that the future of feminist politics in 2018 lies in recognizing the work of women of color, who have been leaders across feminist issues for a long time, often with little recognition from white Americans.

Sexual misconduct allegations aren’t the only reason Moore lost

Despite the accusations against him, made public at a time when women all over the country are speaking out against sexual harassment and assault, Roy Moore managed to get 41 percent of women’s votes across races. But, according to preliminary exit polls, black voters turned out in large numbers and voted overwhelmingly against him. Ninety-eight percent of black women voted for Doug Jones; 93 percent of black men did the same. As Vann R. Newkirk II put it in the Atlantic, “black voters were informed and mobilized to go vote, and did so even in the face of significant barriers.” Voter ID laws and DMV closures in the state appeared to disproportionately affect black residents, and civil rights groups and voters raised concerns about voter suppression on Election Day.

Nor did Moore necessarily lose the election because of women’s reports of sexual misconduct. Only 7 percent of voters said those reports were the single most important factor in their decision, along with 34 percent who said they were one of several important factors.

Though women’s reports of Moore’s behavior certainly should have disqualified him from public office — the man was, after all, reportedly banned from a mall for bothering teenage girls — he had shown himself to be unfit for that office long before the sexual abuse allegations came to light. As chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, he was relieved of his duties twice for failing to follow the law: once for refusing to remove a monument bearing the Ten Commandments from the state Supreme Court building and once for telling Alabama judges not to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples, in violation of the Supreme Court’s decision. He has described “homosexual conduct” as “an inherent evil against which children must be protected,” as Mark Joseph Stern notes at Slate. In a 2006 op-ed titled “Muslim Ellison should not sit in Congress,” he compared the Quran to Mein Kampf.

On the campaign trail, he continued to show voters exactly who he was. At a September campaign rally, he opined that America was great “when families were united — even though we had slavery.” Given that slave holders often separated families and sexually assaulted enslaved people, it seemed clear which families Moore was prioritizing.

Tuesday night’s vote was a victory for harassment and assault survivors, certainly. It was also a victory for anyone who cares about the civil rights of LGBTQ, Muslim, and black Americans. One of the lessons of this election is that these issues are inseparable from the fight for women’s rights and women’s safety. It’s not a new lesson, especially for LGBTQ women and women of color, but it will be important for all feminists to remember in the months ahead.

The second important lesson — also far from new — is that white women cannot necessarily be relied upon to reject candidates accused of sexual misconduct. That was clear after the election of President Donald Trump, and it’s even clearer now. That doesn’t mean it should fall on black women to “save” America from predatory men, as Vox’s P.R. Lockhart has noted.

“In a state where a disproportionate level ofAfrican Americans face rampant poverty, poor education systems, and unequal access to healthcare, the votes of black women weren’t about some altruistic mission to save America from itself,” Lockhart wrote. “Their votes were a very real attempt to make a change that would help themselves and their families.”

Tuesday night’s election was a reminder that feminism as a movement has to acknowledge the longstanding leadership of women of color on sexual assault prevention, as on a variety of issues. Tarana Burke was living in Alabama a decade ago when she decided to start the Me Too campaign to help survivors of sexual violence, she told me in October, and she is one of many women of color whose work has at times been forgotten or ignored by white feminists.

Feminism can win elections — but not if it only focuses on white women and their concerns

Today’s feminist movement cannot ignore women of color — not because women of color are needed to support causes championed by white women, but because women of color have often been the ones on the front lines, championing feminist causes when white women won’t. Black women are the ones who voted overwhelmingly to defeat Roy Moore. They also voted overwhelmingly for Hillary Clinton in 2016, with just 3 percent casting a vote for Trump.

Women of color are already leading activism on issues ranging from reproductive justice to pay equality, but they haven’t always been recognized as leaders by white feminists or mainstream feminist groups. In a recent example, Zahara Hill noted at Ebony that initial coverage of the #MeToo hashtag failed to credit Burke, and that in the social media conversation around the hashtag, “Black women were quickly isolated from the dialogue before we could familiarize ourselves with it.” Exclusions like that can’t happen if feminism is to be relevant as a political force in 2018.

One hopeful sign was the Women’s Convention in October. The Women’s March on Washington in January, first called the Million Woman March, had been criticized for using the language of black civil rights activists for an event initially conceived largely by white women. “Once again, the labors of Black folks (in this case, the 1995 Million Man March and the 1997 Million Woman March organized by Minister Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam) were being co-opted and erased by clueless White ones,” Jamilah Lemieux wrote at ColorLines in January. “And just what would this ‘million’ women be coming together to march about—their mothers, sisters, homegirls and friends who elected Trump in the first place?”

The organizers of the Women’s Convention — Tamika Mallory, Carmen Perez, Linda Sarsour, Bob Bland, and more — worked hard to highlight the work of leaders of color at the October gathering, and called on white attendees repeatedly to support people of color, rather than only demanding their support. A panel called “Confronting White Womanhood,” designed to help white women recognize their own roles in perpetuating racism, was so popular it was ultimately held twice. In a closing panel, political commentator Angela Rye advised the crowd to support black-owned businesses, put their money in black-owned banks, and donate to black-run charities.

Not all feminists are women, and not every woman identifies as a feminist, even if she supports some of the goals that feminists fight for. Still, feminism has emerged as a powerful political force in the wake of the Women’s March, convention, and the elections this November, in which Danica Roem beat the author of a discriminatory “bathroom bill” to become the first transgender woman in the Virginia House of Delegates, and Ashley Bennett won a seat on the Atlantic County Board of Chosen Freeholders, beating out a man who had made a sexist joke about Women’s Marchers cooking dinner.

The feminism that is winning elections, however, is one that encompasses more than the concerns of white women, and more than issues traditionally thought of as “women’s issues.” It’s one that includes criminal justice reform and resistance to mass incarceration, a living wage for domestic workers and protections for immigrants, LGBTQ equality and voting rights for all.

Candidates who can speak to those issues in 2018 and beyond are likely to energize a powerful base of voters of color, LGBTQ voters, and their allies. Candidates who try to preach feminism while appealing only to white voters, meanwhile, are likely to fail.

The most important policy question of the day: What does Doug Jones's underdog win Tuesday night mean for the GOP tax overhaul drive?

Officially, the answer is nothing. Party leaders believe they can draft a bill by Friday and pass it on Monday, at which point they'll still have 52 Senate votes and thus room to spare even with Bob Corker defecting.

But can they really get it done on that schedule? They've made promises to Susan Collins on health care and Jeff Flake on immigration that House Republicans seem disinclined to keep.

John McCain might develop some mavericky process objections to slamming a bill through with the vote of a lame-duck senator who the voters of Alabama rejected in a primary. Will House Republicans from California develop second thoughts about walking the plank on a SALT provision that's terrible for their constituents after watching the party lose in Alabama?

In the past few days, House Speaker Paul Ryan has thrown cold water on those bills [Matt: i.e., the ones Collins got Senate leaders to promise to pass to stabilize health insurance markets] and the White House started to back away from its commitment. House Republicans have warned that there aren’t the votes in the lower chamber to pass the bills Collins supports.

Collins has in turn started to leave herself room to oppose the final tax plan that House and Senate negotiators are working on, if her demands are not met.

This path to failure has become clear: Jones wins in Alabama on Tuesday, the tax negotiations drag on long enough for him to be seated, and Collins flips to a “no” vote because her extracted concessions on health care fall through.

For my part, I think it's noteworthy how much Jones talked about CHIP. Obviously it'd be silly to say that CHIP was the main issue in this race. But Jones did want to inject some policy substantive into his pitch, and the ground he chose to pick that fight on was CHIP — and it was an issue that succeeded at inspiring the base to come out and fight without being off-putting to crossover voters.

Just a reminder that Republicans in Washington are putting themselves out on some dangerous policy limbs.

This is an abbreviated web version of The Weeds newsletter, a limited-run policy newsletter from Vox’s Matt Yglesias. Sign up to get the full Weeds newsletter in your inbox, plus more charts, tweets, and email-only content.

Pennsylvania father Osman Enriquez was waiting for a letter telling him to reapply.

A former DACA recipient who was waiting to reapply for deportation protections, after his initial application was rejected due to postal service delays, is currently in the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Pennsylvania, Vox has exclusively learned.

Osman Enriquez, who was picked up by ICE Monday morning after a routine traffic stop, is one of the estimated 12,000 immigrants who have lost their DACA protections since the Trump administration started winding down the program in September.

Enriquez is among those immigrants. According to the Trump administration, he’s supposed to wait to be invited to reapply by US Citizenship and Immigration Services. Instead, he’s being put on the road to deportation. (DHS did not respond to a request for comment.)

Enriquez might be the first known case of an immigrant getting detained by ICE after his DACA expired under the administration’s new rules. He’s almost certainly the first known case of an immigrant getting detained while waiting to reapply for DACA renewal.

His presence there is perhaps the most vivid reminder yet that as Congress drags out what to do about DACA recipients, it will probably be too late for some.

A typical DACA recipient becomes a detainee

Osman Enriquez is a pretty typical DACA recipient. He’s a 27-year-old from Guatemala who graduated from a Lancaster, Pennsylvania, high school and now works in stonemasonry. He was convicted of a “summary offense” (a minor crime) as a juvenile, but it wasn’t enough to stop him from qualifying for, and getting, protection under DACA. His fiancée has a green card, and their son, who’s not quite a year old, was born in the United States.

When the Trump administration announced on September 5 that it would end DACA, Enriquez’s work permit was set to expire in a little over a month — on October 15. According to the administration, that made him (and 154,000 other DACA recipients whose work permits were set to expire before March 5, 2018) eligible to apply for a two-year renewal of protections — but only if they got their applications in by October 5.

Enriquez went to the Lancaster office of immigrant advocacy and legal services organization Church World Service for help with his renewal application. According to Carrie Carranza of CWS, his application was mailed September 18. “His application was mailed out at same time as many other DACA applications that have now been approved,” she told Vox on Wednesday.

But Enriquez wasn’t so lucky. His application arrived at the USCIS service center in Chicago on October 10 — three weeks after he mailed it, and five days after the deadline. It was rejected.

At the time, Carranza says, they didn’t really understand what had happened; “We told him, ‘We’re so sorry this happened; you did everything right; it was just a fluke, a debacle, out of your control.’”

It turns out the scope of the “debacle” was beyond anything she could imagine. It is likely that thousands of DACA renewal applications were mailed in advance of the deadline but were slowed down by USPS delays — including many that were received at government dropboxes on October 5 but were rejected because they were not picked up until the next day.

When reports from the New York Times and Vox highlighted the problem in November, USCIS reversed itself, declaring that immigrants whose DACA renewals had been mailed on time would be given the chance to reapply.

In guidance issued at the end of November (and included in the current FAQs about DACA on the USCIS website), the government says, “The USPS is working with USCIS to identify DACA requests that were received after the deadline due to USPS mail-service delays” — like Enriquez’s.

“As soon as USPS completes its assessment, identifies such requests, and provides this information to USCIS, USCIS will send affected DACA requestors a letter inviting them to resubmit their DACA request. If you receive such a letter, you will have 33 calendar days from the date of the letter to resubmit your request.”

The FAQ estimates that the Postal Service assessment will be done by “mid-December,” and that USCIS will send invitations to reapply about a week after that.

But in the meantime, Enriquez was in limbo. His work permit had expired, but he still had to work to support his family; his driver’s license had expired, because it was only valid as long as he had DACA, but he still needed to drive to get to work.

On Monday morning — six days before his son’s first birthday — as Enriquez drove down Route 83 to his contracting job, he was pulled over by a Pennsylvania State Police officer. The officer told him his vehicle registration had expired. Enriquez’s fiancée says the family thought they had kept their registration current; since Pennsylvania doesn’t put registration-date stickers on license plates, Carranza speculates that the only way the trooper would have known Enriquez’s registration had lapsed would be if she’d run his license plates when he drove by.

Enriquez was ultimately issued a ticket not for the expired registration, but for his expired driver’s license. But in the meantime, Carranza says, the state police officer had called Immigration and Customs Enforcement to come pick up Enriquez. ICE agents took him to the York detention center and served him with a notice to appear in immigration court — formally starting deportation proceedings against him.

Two days later, Enriquez is still in detention. Unless something changes, he’ll miss his son’s birthday on Saturday.

The Trump administration made this inevitable, and only Congress can stop it from getting worse

Advocates and Democrats, extrapolating from USCIS numbers, have estimated that 122 immigrants will lose their DACA protections every day between October 5 and March 5. (That doesn’t count the immigrants arrested by ICE despite still having DACA, or whose DACA protections have been stripped from them after an arrest.)

But despite fears that ICE would use the information contained in DACA applications to track down and arrest immigrants, there don’t appear to have been any cases (at least, not any known to the public) in which immigrants who have lost DACA after September have actually been detained. Until now.

But what happened to Enriquez is the inevitable outcome of the way the Trump administration wound down DACA. It gave immigrants an unusually short amount of time to apply for renewal, then enforced stricter-than-usual rules about what counted as a timely application. Their current plan to allow some immigrants affected by mail delays to reapply still puts many immigrants at risk of a gap between one work permit expiring and a new one being issued. And during that time, working, driving, and existing in the US put DACA-eligible immigrants at just as much risk of deportation as any other unauthorized immigrant.

You can’t understand the current debate in Congress over how and when to help DACA recipients without understanding this phenomenon. Elected Democrats are extremely aware that people are losing DACA every day, and many moderate Republicans also note that the program is less effective the longer it’s allowed to wind down. But Republican leadership isn’t thinking about the program’s efficacy; it’s focused on the March 5 “deadline” set by the White House, and sees no need to take action before then.

At present, Democrats are trying to figure out if the urgency of DACA is enough to withhold votes on a must-pass government funding bill days before Christmas — risking a government shutdown — or whether to allow the issue to fall into 2018. If they pick the latter, they’ll have to hope that Republicans see the March 5 deadline as a serious deadline, like a government funding bill, and not a “deadline” like funding the Children’s Health Insurance Program (which Congress has allowed to lapse for 73 days and counting).

And in the meantime, Osman Enriquez, and perhaps others like him, will be waiting in a detention cell for Congress to make up its mind.

CORRECTION: This article originally identified the CWS staffer in Lancaster as “Carrie Hussein,” a name she no longer goes by. Her name is now Carrie Carranza.

The latest sexual harassment controversy on Capitol Hill is coming from a woman Democratic lawmaker, who recently seemed to suggest that women themselves are inviting the harassment with the clothes they wear.

At a private Democratic caucus meeting this morning, Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-OH) reportedly chastised her fellow women Congress members and staffers for wearing “revealing” clothing, according to a report by Politico’s Heather Caygle.

“I saw a member yesterday with her cleavage so deep it was down to the floor,” Kaptur said, sources present told Politico. “And what I’ve seen … it's really an invitation.”

Kaptur, 71, added that women working on Capitol Hill should take prompts from the military or private corporations when choosing their outfits.

“Maybe I’ll get booed for saying this, but many companies and the military [have] a dress code,” she said. “I have been appalled at some of the dress of ... members and staff. Men have to wear ties and suits.”

Kaptur’s comments reportedly left her colleagues in the room “stunned,” some people so much that their mouths fell open.

In a statement provided to Politico, Kaptur later apologized for her comments.

“When I was first elected to Congress my office and I became a refuge for female staffers who had been mistreated by their bosses. Some of them in tears many days. It is something I carry with me to this day and something I brought up during our Caucus meeting," she said. "Under no circumstances is it the victim's fault if they are harassed in any way. I shared the stories from my time here in the context of the ‘Me Too’ legislation and how we can elevate the decorum and the dress code to protect women from what is a pervasive problem here and in society at large.”

Earlier this year, Speaker of the House Paul Ryan relaxed the dress code in the House of Representatives after some women complained they were being barred from certain events or press conferences for wearing sleeveless dresses.

The official death toll from Hurricane Maria is 64. The data suggests it’s more than 1,000.

Two Democratic members of Congress are pushing for a federal investigation of hurricane-related deaths in Puerto Rico in light of mounting evidence suggesting that the official figure of 64 deaths has been “artificially suppressed.”

Rep. Nydia Velázquez (D-NY) and Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-MS) sent a letter to the Government Accountability Office on Wednesday citing analyses by Vox, The New York Times, and other media outlets that found the actual death toll may be at least 1,000. They’re asking the GAO to audit and evaluate the Puerto Rican government’s methodology in calculating the death toll.

“Donald Trump came to Puerto Rico and shamefully bragged that the death toll was something to be proud of,” Velázquez said in a statement. “In the meantime, every credible statistical analysis suggests that the actual loss of life is staggeringly higher than the official numbers. We need an impartial analysis of how many people have died and are dying from Maria in Puerto Rico so the public fully grasps the magnitude of this humanitarian crisis and our government responds appropriately.”

As Vox reported, social science researchers who used mortality data from the Puerto Rico Vital Statistics System to compare the historical death averages for September and October to deaths this year found that the number of people who died from the storm is closer to 1,085. A New York Times analysis of similar data found that the death toll could be at least 1,052.

If the government’s death toll is indeed as inaccurate as these analyses suggest it is, there are immediate, serious consequences for the people of Puerto Rico, the lawmakers said.

“In coming weeks, as Congress considers additional aid for hurricane-impacted areas, including Puerto Rico, the official death count will likely shape the scope and direction of federal assistance,” Velázquez and Thompson wrote in the letter.

Velázquez and Thompson have been pressing for a federal review of the death count since October, after Vox and other media outlets found evidence that dozens of hurricane deaths were not included in the government's count.

In early October, they asked the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees FEMA, to conduct an audit on Puerto Rico’s death count. Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey then demanded the same.

In the letter to the GAO, they say they were rebuffed by FEMA administrator Brock Long, who told them last week that the agency plays no role in determining cause of deaths.

Now they are hoping the GAO will take the lead. The nonpartisan congressional watchdog’s role includes “auditing agency operations to determine whether federal funds are being spent efficiently and effectively.”

Here’s what Velázquez and Thompson are requesting:

An audit of Puerto Rico’s death toll methodology

An explanation of whether GAO believes with any confidence that the official death count offered by the Puerto Rican government reflects the death toll on the Island from Maria

An evaluation of why this methodology is or is not sufficient in accurately examining deaths from natural disasters

An explanation of how Puerto Rico’s procedures in this area differ from other states or localities

A summary of the most widely used methods for determining death counts by all states and localities in the US

Recommendations for improving this process in Puerto Rico and providing uniformity for death counts during future disasters in other states and localities

With Rian Johnson at the helm, Episode VIII examines power and brings hope to a weary universe.

When it was released in 1977, the first Star Wars movie only bore the title Star Wars. Later, the subtitle A New Hope was added — and with it, a subtle intimation of what this series is all about. The Star Wars saga explores lots of ideas, but one it keeps cycling back to is the idea of hope. Where does it come from? Why? And when it looks like the last glimmer of hope has been extinguished, is there any reason to go on?

For decades, each Star Wars installment has explored those ideas, moving from hope to despair and back again as a fundamentally moral political battle wages between a dark side bent on its own immense power and a scrappy bunch of rebels who dare to think everyone matters. And now, 40 years after it all started, the eighth installment in the Star Wars series, The Last Jedi, retreads that basic setup with a mastery that isn’t just reminiscent of the series’ best entries, but takes its place alongside them.

The Last Jedi moves The Force Awakens’ characters forward

I don’t want to spoil the movie for you. You don’t want that either.

So let me just say...

(Seriously, if you don’t want any spoilers at ALL, not even basic place-setting stuff, then just take my word for it and go see the movie.)

...that The Last Jedi picks up more or less exactly where The Force Awakens left off, with the evil First Order ready to strike back against Resistance forces in retaliation for destroying their superweapon, the Starkiller Base. The rebel army is still led by General Leia Organa (the late Carrie Fisher, in her final Star Wars appearance). Hotshot Resistance pilot Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac) — with his droid pal BB-8 — is out in front in the counterattack, going briefly rogue to accomplish his mission, while Finn (John Boyega) is healing from the wounds inflicted on him by Darth Vader heir-apparent Kylo Ren (Adam Driver, who continues to knock it out of the park).

LucasfilmAdam Driver in Star Wars: The Last Jedi.

Meanwhile, on the faraway planet Ahch-To, Rey (Daisy Ridley) — who now knows she can harness the Force herself — has just encountered Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) and handed him his lightsaber.

The Last Jedi follows the resistance fighters as they struggle to survive through an increasingly painful series of blows, exacerbated by the First Order’s newfound ability to track their forces through hyperspace jumps. This realization sends Finn and ship’s engineer Rose (a fantastic Kelly Marie Tran) to a new planet where they search for someone who can help them. Meanwhile, though Rey and Kylo Ren are far away from one another, they seem to be experiencing a psychic connection that suggests the answers to some of their questions about themselves and each other may lie in surprising places.

The Last Jedi doesn’t just feel like a Star Wars movie — it feels like a movie

The strength of 2015’s The Force Awakens came from its careful retreading of ground that was already broken by earlier Star Wars films, in ways that pleased fans who were terrified this new trilogy would repeat the mistakes of George Lucas’s “prequel” trilogy. The Force Awakens calmed fears, reminded viewers why the series worked in the first place, and introduced a more diverse set of characters that made the whole Star Wars thing feel fresh and fun again.

And yet, if The Force Awakens was a great variation on a theme, then The Last Jedi is another movement altogether in the symphony. There are images in this movie that provoke awe and delight, and creatures that feel lifted out of half-remembered childhood dreams. And though it briefly appears to lose steam in the middle, that’s short-lived, with a third act harboring sequences that feel like a maestro conducting a concerto the size of the cosmos.

LucasfilmJohn Boyega in Star Wars: The Last Jedi.

There is catharsis aplenty, something the Star Wars movies are designed for, encouraging us to cheer when our favorite characters show up on screen and letting us thrill to the chases and the romance and the vistas and the explosions and the lightsaber battles. (This installment has one of the most purely perfect lightsaber battles the series has yielded thus far.) But as written and directed by Rian Johnson, The Last Jedi doesn’t just feel like a well-executed Star Wars movie — it feels like a well-executed movie, period, one that keeps its eye on the relationships between characters, and how they communicate with one another, in addition to the bigger picture.

Some of this has to do with the fact that The Force Awakens did the heavy lifting by introducing (or in some cases reintroducing) these characters to us, so Johnson doesn’t have to start from scratch. But one of Johnson’s strengths as a writer and director has always been injecting humanity and intelligence into characters who live inside familiar genres; they’re definitely characters, but they’re people, too. He knows how to make us feel for them.

LucasfilmKelly Marie Tran and John Boyega in Star Wars: The Last Jedi.

That means that a character like the loser General Hux (Domhnall Gleeson as a marvelous sad sap), locked in his eternal battle with Kylo Ren for dominance and the attention of Supreme Commander Snoke (Andy Serkis), is the butt of many jokes, but he also has a glimmer of the unwanted pet dog about him that lends a little pathos to our scorn.

It means we get a character like Rose, who trips believably over herself when she first meets Resistance Hero Finn, but quickly shows she’s brilliant, and has a strong and courageous side too. It means Luke becomes more than a reclusive hero-in-waiting, coming to recognize the battle that’s been raging inside of him and how it colors the way he interacts with the world, and with Rey.

Thanks to Johnson’s impish sense of humor, the film is littered with jokes — some of the best obviously nod to various fan theories that have sprung up in The Force Awaken’s wake — as well as allusions to other films and a truly wonderful menagerie of fauna ranging far beyond the already-beloved puffin-like porgs, all of which brings warmth and humor to a story that is, at its core, very serious.

But the best details are in the strong bonds that develop between characters, and the way those bonds show who each individual really is. When one character says that the only way to live free is to not join, it’s the film’s encapsulation of what constitutes a bad guy: Star Wars films are testaments to the idea that nobody, not even a Jedi Master, can go it alone without getting destroyed.

The Last Jedi is a ray of hope and an examination of power

The Last Jedi is also a deeply political film, though not in the sense that it’s “the film we need right now,” designed to speak to our “current moment” — in a saga as mythic and timeless as Star Wars, that would be a serious mischaracterization. But Star Wars is fundamentally cyclical, a story of generations and history, and the ways that wars can be won in one generation and lost in the next if memory of the past isn’t preserved. That’s the story in the films, but it’s also the story of the films, with people who grew up watching Star Wars movies now bringing their children to new Star Wars movies. And it’s no spoiler to say that the generational nature of its tale is something The Last Jedi alludes to explicitly several times.

Since the movies are part of our world as much as their own, it’s only natural they’d speak to the big, important ideas that animate political questions of every age. One of the biggest of those is whether power is ultimately a corrupting force, or if it can be wielded for good, and by whom.

LucasfilmDomnhall Gleeson in Star Wars: The Last Jedi.

In the Star Wars universe, power (often embodied in an ability to control the Force) is indeed a potent corruptor, one that’s hard to walk away from once you’ve gotten a taste. This is what lies behind the stories of the villainous Sith order, but it’s a tension that the heroic Jedi face, too.

In The Last Jedi, the factors determining how power will be wielded and yielded are an awareness of history and — most importantly — a connection to that history through the people around you. It would spoil the story to say much more, but in several key scenes, characters face a choice between following the right path and disconnecting from their pasts and from others. The choice is clear, and the images near the film’s end underline it in moving fashion.

That’s nothing new for Star Wars, which has always been a space opera about a family. But this particular iteration drives home that point in a manner that feels, on the tail end of a wearying year, like a deep point of relief, and even joy. Watching lengthy sequences involving heroic, complex characters played by black and Asian and Latinx characters, we can see a future worth living in. Being told that one character was “more interested in protecting the light than she was in seeming like a hero” is a reminder about wielding power well that feels deeply truthful and necessary today.

LucasfilmDaisy Ridley in Star Wars: The Last Jedi.

I didn’t grow up with Star Wars, or much pop culture at all. I only saw the films as an adult, and while I’ve always liked them, I never connected to them the way so many people have; whatever it was they were trying to give me never really found its place in my heart. I went to The Last Jedi with high expectations because of the talent behind it, but I was prepared to just have a good time. And I walked out feeling many emotions, but especially something like hope, that elusive thing with feathers (though hope, to be clear, is not a porg).

I felt expectant, and I believed not just that what the movie was saying was true — that even a small band of people with purpose, conviction, and a good, true story to tell can carry on in the face of evil — but that there’s a special power to saying it in a movie.

Star Wars has been with us for four decades now, telling that same essential story in a format that’s overwhelming and engulfing. With wit, skill, and love, The Last Jedi takes up the torch and carries it for a new generation.

Roy Moore’s surprising defeat in Alabama included evidence of a slight dip in the number of evangelical Christians participating in the Alabama election. Based on the exit polls, it appears that a small group of self-identifying white evangelicals stayed home instead of voting Republican as they had in previous elections. Also, 2 percent of evangelicals and conservatives said they wrote in a candidate, a significant total in such a close outcome.

Still, among those white voters who identified as evangelicals, a robust 80 percent voted for Roy Moore. This is the same percentage of self-described white evangelicals nationally who supported Donald Trump in the 2016 election.

During this fall’s campaign, the controversy over Moore and his alleged cases of sexual assault produced a predictable storyline about the “evangelical” response to Moore. One widely reported polling statistic had 37 percent of Alabama “evangelicals” saying that they were “more likely” to support Moore following the allegations.

As a professor who studies the history of Christianity — and an evangelical — I find myself continually frustrated with news pieces like this. When I read such stories about “evangelicals,” I wonder who these “evangelicals” actually are, and why much of the media is so eager to peddle storylines, however implausible, related to evangelical hypocrisy.

Anyone who thought for a second about the supposed evangelical reaction to Moore should have been incredulous. To me, the charges against Moore are disturbing and disqualifying. Many of his supporters disagree. But really, would anybody tell a pollster that allegations that a candidate had sexually abused minors would make them more inclined to support that candidate?

Whoever these “evangelicals” might be, they’re obviously saying that they don’t believe the charges against Moore, and they’re sticking by their man in the face of “fake news.” (43% of voters said in exit polling that they thought the charges were “definitely or probably false.) I’m not trying to defend Moore here, I’m just suggesting that the power of the “fake news” theme gives Moore’s defenders a ready response against the explosive charges women have made against him.

Nate Silver called out this silly interpretation on Twitter:

I'm seeing this data point cited a LOT and would encourage some caution about interpreting it.For most voters, "more likely to support after allegations" means "I'm a Moore supporter & don't believe the allegations" and not "I approve of the conduct the allegations allege". https://t.co/KfYsoS0zhv

It’s an all-too-common cycle. Some in the media believe and promote the absolute worst about evangelicals. Those evangelicals then lament fake news, even when the news (like the charges against Moore) seems not so fake.

Part of this is just a fundamental problem with polling. There are so many possible meanings left open by the way a question is framed, the context in which it is asked, the person responding, and the reporter’s interpretation.

Even more problematic, these stories employ a vague concept of “evangelical,” a term that has become almost totally disconnected from its historic meaning. Since 1980 and the rise of the Moral Majority, “evangelical” has become a descriptor more associated with politics than with theology or Christian practices. Evangelical spokespeople from Jerry Falwell to Franklin Graham have done as much as the secular media to create this impression. It has left us with a deeply diluted public image of what the word means. Polls make this problem worse by relying on self-identification of evangelicals, and evangelical self-definition has shifted over time.

I suspect that large numbers of these people who identify as “evangelicals” are really just whites who watch Fox News and who consider themselves religious.

To me, the controversy involving the reasons for evangelical support for Roy Moore reveals how little we understand evangelicals as a group in modern America.

Who really identifies as “evangelical” today?

One challenge in determining what “evangelicals” believe is the difficulty in getting solid polling data on any subject. Observers have noted that ever since the advent of cellphones, reliable polling has become ever more difficult. Polls routinely get no more than a 10 percent response rate. Some academic experts, including sociologist colleagues of mine at Baylor, have begun to despair about using polls to gather reliable information about anything at all.

The second difficulty is this self-identification issue. Some polls do use other means of determining who an evangelical is, such as church affiliation. But most pollsters simply ask a person if they identify as an evangelical, and if the answer is yes, then that person is taken to have evangelical views about Donald Trump’s latest antics, or whatever the topic is.

This is highly dubious. For instance, if you ask more probing questions, it turns out that significant numbers of these “evangelicals” do not go to church. One study of the 2016 GOP primaries showed that these non-churchgoing evangelicals were more likely to support Trump — around 53 percent of Trump supporting evangelicals marked that they seldom/never went to church. That percentage dropped to around 36 percent for Trump-supporting evangelicals who went to church weekly. Of course, a strong majority of self-identified evangelicals went on to support Trump in the general election.

In many cases, we have no idea how many of these “evangelicals” read the Bible regularly, have been born again, or share other hallmarks of historic evangelicalism. A recent study from LifeWay Research suggests that less than half of self-identifying evangelicals are deeply committed to classic evangelical beliefs.

To be fair, many polls do explicitly break out white voters from black, Hispanic, and other voters, giving some additional texture to the political views among self-identified evangelicals — so not all polls are free of nuance. And if my hunch is correct, it would be worth investigating how the term “evangelical” became code for a kind of nominal Christianity in America.

Evangelical Christianity was founded to combat nominal Christianity

The thing is, evangelical Christianity was founded to combat nominal Christianity, meaning a Christianity that is more a cultural label than a vital, active faith. Most experts trace the origins of evangelical Christianity to the mid-1700s and the coming of the Great Awakening. Many countries in those days, including Britain and its colonies, had established denominations and churches: government-funded religion. Having tax-supported churches and ministers often bred complacency and corruption. It did not foster voluntary, heartfelt devotion to God.

Revival preachers like John Wesley, Jonathan Edwards, and George Whitefield — the most famous person in Britain and America in 1740 — told people that it was not good enough to be baptized into your local church, just by accident of birthplace. You needed to make a personal, transforming commitment to Christ, an experience that the Bible referred to as being “born again.” This “new birth” would lead to a life centered on the “gospel” of salvation through Christ.

What today’s “evangelicals” have in common

The most common definition of evangelicalism, one crafted by British historian David Bebbington, boils down to four key points. First is conversion, or the need to be born again. The second is Biblicism, or the need to base one’s faith fundamentally on the Bible. The third is the theological priority of the cross, where Jesus died and won forgiveness for sinners. The final attribute of evangelicals is activism, or acting on the mandates of one’s faith, through supporting your church, sharing the gospel, and engaging in charitable endeavors.

In today’s media, “evangelical” has shifted from the historic definition to become more of a rough political and ethnic signifier. What today’s “evangelicals” have in common is not so much Biblicism or action for the gospel, but a self-defined sense of religiosity and a dogged commitment to Republican politics. And being white.

Evangelical faith has always had political ramifications, of course. For example, many evangelicals fought in the era of the American Revolution to end the tax-supported denominations, which had often persecuted evangelicals. But evangelicals were not much on the political radar screen in modern America until 1976, with the candidacy of the “born again” Jimmy Carter.

But 1980 and the Reagan Revolution convinced many evangelicals that they could have both piety and political power. The most visible evangelical leaders became not evangelists like Billy Graham but political operatives and, later, Fox News contributors. Most of the news media was happy to focus on this new political brand of evangelicalism, even if it became more and more distant from its historic roots.

The image of political evangelicalism fails to recognize most of what was happening in the weekly routines of actual evangelical Christians and their churches. As Bebbington’s definition suggests, most of a typical evangelical’s life has nothing to do with politics.

Finally, as seen in the story on growing “evangelical” support for Roy Moore, the news media lovesstories on “evangelical” hypocrisy. Evangelicals have always been capable of hypocrisy, of course. Anyone who wears their faith on their sleeve is going to be held to a higher standard, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But too often, we actually know little about the “evangelicals” being charged with hypocrisy. Other than political allegiances, we don’t know much about what the term evangelical means anymore.

Before you read a story and despair about the state of evangelicalism in America, then, pause for a second. The reality about evangelicals may indeed be bad and disheartening. But are polls really supplying accurate information about “evangelicals” and their beliefs? Or does our country largely misunderstand what it means to be evangelical in America today?

Both the House and Senate versions of the Republican tax bill now include provisions that would serioulsy threaten the wind and solar industries. The hemming and hawing over them is meanwhile also stalling more than $20 billion in investment in clean energy, according to Democratic lawmakers who oppose the cuts.

But here’s the catch: wind and solar are booming not just in deep blue states like California, but also in red states like Texas, Wyoming, Kansas, and Iowa.

Texas, Wyoming, Kansas, and Colorado have become leaders in renewable energy and also benefit from federal incentives for electric cars and home efficiency upgrades that could be cut under the bill.

The main issue for renewables is a provision in the Senate bill called the Base Erosion Anti-Abuse Tax (BEAT). The measure is aimed at companies that move money offshore to lower their tax liability in the United States. The BEAT adds a 10 percent minimum tax on businesses that don’t include cross-border payments in their income calculations.

How does this affect renewables? In the United States, the main incentive for erecting wind turbines and mounting solar farms is a tax credit (wind developers use the production tax credit and solar uses the investment tax credit). By invoking these credits, renewable energy developers can drive their corporate tax rate below 10 percent.

For smaller companies that don’t have a large enough tax liability, they can market their excess credits to tax equity investors.

However, renewable energy projects often have multinational backers, so companies looking to bring in foreign financing may end up with a higher tax bill as they pay off creditors abroad, in some cases canceling out the tax subsidies altogether.

As the law firm McDermott Will & Emery put it, “Multinational tax equity investors reducing their US tax liability from cross-border affiliate payments may therefore find that investments in ITC and PTC eligible projects after enactment of the BEAT are much less attractive.”

Or as Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) put it at a press conference on Wednesday, “it would kneecap clean energy.”

He added that the uncertainty of this provision has put investments in limbo, hampering an industry that would employ 500,000 Americans by 2020. The coal industry, by contrast, currently employs 50,000 people.

An analysis by the Rhodium Group noted that there are some places where the House and Senate versions of the tax bill differ. The House bill strips out the $7,500 tax credit for electric cars, while the Senate version leaves it in, for example. It also cuts the wind tax credit from 2.4 cents per kilowatt-hour to 1.5 cents.

But even the threat of these changes is already having an impact, according to some in the industry.

“We’re already seeing orders put on hold and projects not able to get refinancing,” Michael Goggin, the senior director of research at the American Wind Energy Association, told the New York Times. “Even the threat of this bill is having a chilling effect.”

Some Republicans may try to preserve the clean energy tax credits

Lawmakers are now desperately trying to strike deals to preserve incentives for renewables in the bill they’re aiming to send to the White House before Christmas.

"As the father of the wind energy production tax credit, I've fought for renewable energies like wind power that diversify our energy supply and create good-paying jobs," Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) told E&E News last week. "I'm aware of the argument that the provision could negatively impact some renewable energy projects. I'm currently looking into the matter further."

Sen. Cory Gardner says the BEAT issue has not been resolved yet. Says “progress is being made.” (Caution: This could be congress speak for “I didn’t get what I wanted.”)

With a narrow vote margin and a looming end-of-year deadline, some Republicans have suggested excising the clean energy aspects of the bill altogether.

"We've got to be careful not to cost ourselves votes on the tax relief bill," Sen. John Hoeven (R-ND) told E&E News this week. "We'll see what comes out of conference, but the general sense, at least I got, was that's why we probably won't get into a number of those issues in this bill, we'll just focus on the tax relief."

The question now is whether the tax bill, which contains a buffet of other unpopular provisions, will win the support of enough Republicans to pass in a vote expected next week. There is also the possibility of a separate bill with tax extenders for energy.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas announced Wednesday that the Palestinians will no longer work with American peace negotiators in the wake of President Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital on December 6, the first serious diplomatic fallout from the deeply controversial move.

Speaking to a conference of Muslim leaders in Istanbul, Abbas called Trump’s decision a “crime” that left the US unqualified to continue in its historic role as the main international arbiter in the conflict, a role that he said should now go to the United Nations. Leaders at the conference asked the international community to recognize East Jerusalem as the Palestinian capital.

The comments from Abbas were the Palestinians’ angriest formal response to the Trump announcement. Whether they’ll have any actual practical impact, though, is far from clear.

Abbas doesn’t have much room to maneuver these days. A public opinion poll published on Wednesday by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research found that, unsurprisingly, more than 90 percent of Palestinians reject Trump’s announcement. But it also found that 70 percent of those polled want Abbas to step down.

In part that’s because Abbas angered many of his own people by publicly cozying up to a president widely seen as a close ally and uncritical supporter of the Israeli government.

When Trump and Abbas met back in May at the White House, Trump assured the press that the Palestinian leader would soon be back in Washington to sign a peace deal with the Israelis. “I want to support you in being the Palestinian leader who signs his name to the final and most important peace agreement that brings safety, security, and prosperity to both peoples and to the region,” Trump told Abbas at the time. He then promised to be a mediator for the peace process.

Abbas, in turn, gushed to the president that his “courageous stewardship” would create the capacity, on all sides, “to be true partners to bring about a historic peace treaty,”

By late summer, the Palestinians were feeling decidedly less enthusiastic.

Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and a point person on the peace process, visited both Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Abbas in the region the last week of August. “The status quo is not working for our interests,” Ahmad Majdalani, a member of Abbas’s staff, told the press before Kushner visited.

But Kushner’s attentions had Abbas expressing hope once more. “We greatly appreciate the efforts of US President Donald Trump who pledged from the beginning that he is going to work for the ultimate deal," the Palestinian leader said before his conversation with Kushner.

"We know things are difficult and complicated, but nothing is impossible with good intentions."

He sure isn’t using words like that now.

Palestinians are promising not to work with Trump. That may not mean much.

Israelis and Palestinians both claim Jerusalem as their capital. Though Israel’s parliament and the prime minister’s home are in Jerusalem, they sit in West Jerusalem, the side of the city Israel has controlled since 1949. Israel captured East Jerusalem in 1967 and annexed that half of the city. The international community views that land as occupied territory; the Palestinians would like it to be their capital one day.

Since 1988 and the beginning of a peace process that envisioned a two-state solution to the conflict — that is, an independent Palestinian state and an independent Israeli state side by side — US policy has been to leave the status of Jerusalem to be decided by the two sides as part of a final peace agreement.

Trump’s statement last week changed that policy.

The Palestinian leadership is reeling from Trump’s decision -- and their own choices to trust him despite their initial misgivings, according to Khaled Elgindy, a fellow in the Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution. Trump’s announcement, he told me Monday, “[was] a huge setback — I can’t overstate how devastating this is for this Palestinian leadership.”

In the days leading up to Trump’s announcement last week, Abbas said recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and moving the US Embassy from Tel Aviv would have grave consequences “for the peace process and security and stability in the region and world.”

But while many thousands did take to the streets in Jerusalem, the West Bank, Lebanon, Morocco, Yemen, Indonesia, and Turkey, by Monday morning they had begun to walk away. Leaders around the world condemned Trump’s decision, and the region remains on edge, but the response has been, thus far, less robust than anticipated.

That’s not to say there wasn’t violence: Four Palestinian protesters were killed in clashes with Israeli security forces, and hundreds were wounded. On Sunday afternoon, a lone Palestinian attacker stabbed an Israeli security guard. But those incidents thus far have remained isolated and, until now, haven’t sparked wider protests.

Immediately following Trump’s statement of recognition, Abbas’s office announced that no Palestinian leader would meet with Vice President Mike Pence when he arrives in the region next week.

Now Abbas is promising a much fuller break with the US. It remains to be seen whether he carries through with the threat — and whether, given the currently moribund peace process, those words change anything at all.

It’s long been very difficult to plot a plausible path to a Democratic Senate takeover in 2018, since the party faces such a disadvantage in the map. Democrats have needed to gain, on net, three seats. Assuming they defend all 26 of their own that are up (no easy task), there are then two Republican-held seats — Nevada and Arizona — that have seemed seriously in play.

But the other six Republican seats up next year have long seemed like long shots — meaning it was difficult to envision where Democrats could pick up that elusive third GOP-controlled seat. Not anymore, though — as former Obama administration staffer Matthew Miller tweeted after Jones won, the magic number for the party is now down to two:

Six months ago, I asked the smartest Dem Senate strategist where the three seats to win the majority back were: "Nevada, Arizona, and an act of God." Got the hardest one first.

The Alabama result also serves as a reminder that seemingly uncompetitive races can, under certain circumstances, tighten up. A divisive GOP primary ended in the controversial Moore defeating the party establishment’s preferred candidate. The race was closer than expected even before Moore was accused of sexually assaulting two teenagers last month; after it, Jones got enough of a boost to win.

So it’s a good time to review the entire lineup of Republican Senate seats on the ballot — or that could plausibly be on the ballot — in 2018. We can think of them as follows:

The top two targets: Nevada and Arizona

Two tougher targets: Texas and Tennessee

The possibility that John McCain’s seat in Arizona will also open up

The rest: Wyoming, Nebraska, Utah, and Mississippi (and any other potential special elections)

I’m going to focus on these GOP-held seats, but also just keep in mind that Democrats would also have to play an enormous amount of defense in 2018. Of the 26 of their own seats on the ballot, 10 will be in states Trump won, and five of those will be in states he won overwhelmingly. And for each of their incumbents who does lose, the number of GOP-held seats Democrats would have to win to retake control would go up by one.

The top two targets: Nevada and Arizona

Dean Heller of Nevada has long been the most endangered Republican Senate incumbent, since his is the only GOP-held seat up in a state Trump lost (Hillary Clinton won it by 2.5 points). But things have only gotten worse for him over the course of this year. First, he infuriated conservatives by trying to negotiate changes to the Obamacare repeal bill, and then he infuriated liberals by utterly caving on the issue after reportedly getting an earful from billionaire donors. More recently, he bragged that he “helped write” the deeply unpopular GOP tax bill.

In the general election, Heller will likely face Rep. Jacky Rosen, a Democrat who was first elected to the House of Representatives just last year, but who won the nod of the Democratic establishment in this race. But first he has to get past a primary challenge from Danny Tarkanian, who’s said he’s won the backing of party gadfly Steve Bannon. And though polling of the primary has been sparse so far, Tarkanian has led in some of the ones we’ve seen — signaling a tough road ahead for Heller.

The second obvious target for Democrats is the Arizona seat currently held by Sen. Jeff Flake (R-AZ), who is retiring. Republican leaders hope that Rep. Martha McSally, a retired Air Force colonel, will win the nomination, but she’d face an ugly primary fight against former state Sen. Kelli Ward. Ward is a favorite of some populist conservatives in the state (as well as Bannon), but is viewed by the establishment as a fringe figure who could lose big. Democratic leaders, meanwhile, successfully convinced their preferred candidate — Rep. Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) — to run, and she’s the favorite to win the nomination.

To reiterate: If Democrats manage to hold all of their own seats (something that, again, will be quite difficult!), and win just these two GOP-held seats, they’ll end up with a 51-49 Senate majority in 2019.

Two tougher targets: Texas and Tennessee

Tasos Katopodis/WireImage/GettyTed Cruz

Moving on to Republican seats that are much more of a reach for Democrats — but maybe not completely safe for the GOP — there’s Ted Cruz’s seat in Texas, and the seat of retiring Sen. Bob Corker in Tennessee.

For years, Democrats have been dreaming of making serious gains in Texas — and for years, they’ve failed to do so, despite the growth in the state’s Hispanic population. In 2016, though, Donald Trump only won the state by 9 points, the worst performance for a GOP presidential nominee there in decades. And the senator up for reelection in 2018 is Ted Cruz, a controversial figure with many enemies, who currently has a weak approval rating.

This time around, Democrats have a charismatic and energetic challenger for Cruz in Rep. Beto O’Rourke (a former punk rocker who my colleague Jeff Stein interviewed earlier this year). O’Rourke very definitely an underdog — Texas is a conservative state, it’s an expensive state to compete in, Cruz is a formidable fundraiser, and O’Rourke is still little-known. Still, if the fired-up Democratic enthusiasm we’ve seen this year holds up, this race might end up being closer than many expect.

Next, there is the Tennessee seat currently held by Sen. Bob Corker (R), who is retiring. Donald Trump won Tennessee by a whopping 26 points, so this race is definitely a stretch for Democrats. But former Gov. Phil Bredesen (D) has decided to jump into the race — and though he hasn’t run for office since 2006 and could be a bit rusty, he has won statewide before. The likely GOP nominee is Rep. Marsha Blackburn, a staunch conservative.

Then, John McCain is not in good health

Jennifer Stewart/Getty

It may be impolite to discuss it, but Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) has brain cancer and, he says, a “poor prognosis.” If McCain should pass away or decide to step down in the coming months, his seat would be temporarily filled by an appointee from Arizona’s Republican governor, and a special election to fill the remaining four years of McCain’s term would be scheduled at the same time as the 2018 midterms.

If this were to happen, Arizona would suddenly have both of its US Senate seats on the ballot next year — giving Democrats another pickup opportunity in a state Trump won by just 3.5 points.

Some of the possible Democratic candidates in that scenario would likely be people who considered running for Flake’s seat but ended up declining — like Phoenix Mayor Greg Stanton or former Rep. Ann Kirkpatrick (both of whom are currently running for congressional seats), or State Rep. Randall Friese (a trauma surgeon who treated former Rep. Gabby Giffords after her shooting).

As for Republicans, depending on the timing of the vacancy, likely primary rivals Kelli Ward and Martha McSally could end up running in different races after all. Arizona has several other ambitious Republican members of Congress and state politicians too. For now, though, McCain remains in the Senate and has expressed no plans to step down.

The rest

Rafael Suanes/MCT/MCT via GettyOrrin Hatch

The other remaining GOP-held Senate seats are in such deeply conservative states that few would give Democrats more than an infinitesimal chance of winning any of them. Still, Doug Jones did just pull off his longest-of-shots upset, so let’s run through the remaining possibilities on the table:

Utah: There’s some intrigue around this seat, as 83-year-old Sen. Orrin Hatch (R) has been viewed as likely to retire but hasn’t confirmed his plans to do so just yet. If he does retire, former presidential candidate Mitt Romney will likely run for the GOP nomination. In either case, Salt Lake County Council member Jenny Wilson is running for the Democratic nod.

Wyoming: Sen. John Barrasso (R-WY), who’s close to Mitch McConnell and serves on the GOP Senate leadership team, is running again. Bannon and his allies have mused about recruiting a wealthy conservative — like investor Foster Friess or Blackwater founder Erik Prince — to challenge him in the primary. For Democrats, Jackson Hole businessman Gary Trauner announced last week that he’ll run.

Nebraska: Sen. Deb Fischer (R-NE) will be up for reelection. A conservative in a conservative state, Fischer has nevertheless had a difficult time adapting to the age of Trump — she called on him to leave the race last October after the Access Hollywood “grab ’em by the pussy” tape was released, but then said a few days later that she’d vote for him anyway. Businesswoman and Lincoln City Council member Jane Raybould is running for the Democratic nomination there.

Mississippi: The genial, leadership-aligned Sen. Roger Wicker (R-MS) might face a conservative primary challenge from Chris McDaniel (who nearly won a contentious Senate primary in the state in 2014). It’s not yet clear who the strongest Democratic candidate would be here.

Another special: Finally, it’s of course possible that another unexpected special election could be added to the lineup. For instance, Sen. Thad Cochran (R-MS) has been in poor health, and there have been reports that President Trump might nominate Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) to head the CIA.

Both Mississippi and Arkansas are such conservative states, as are the others mentioned here. But again ... Doug Jones did win.

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Obamacare repeal might really, actually, truly be dead.

Doug Jones, a Democrat, will soon be Alabama's junior senator. The Republican Senate majority will shrink from 52 to 51.

Republicans have sworn to revisit Obamacare repeal next year, after they pass their tax bill. But Jones's victory may have made it impossible for the GOP to succeed where it has previously failed.

Even with 52 Republican senators, the party had yet to find a plan that could win 50 votes. Now the margin for error is even slimmer.

I surveyed a handful of health care lobbyists well-attuned to congressional Republicans on Tuesday night, once Jones had shocked the political world: Is Obamacare repeal dead?

A couple flatly said "yes." One proffered that they still might try. But the odds seem to be fading, and fast.

Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) seems to be a "no" on any major Obamacare repeal plan. Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) has also opposed every bill put forward so far. Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) has shown he's willing to buck his party on health care too. Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) has refused to back any of the substantial repeal-and-replace bills, including Graham-Cassidy, which was the top candidate to be revived if Republicans took up the issue again.

Now you're subtracting Sen. Luther Strange (R-AL), a reliable vote for Republican leaders, and adding Doug Jones, who has said that while the Affordable Care Act could still be improved, "repeal and replace" is just a political slogan that's "not workable."

Then there is one other thing to consider. Republicans are hoping to pass their tax overhaul in a matter of days.

In that bill, they are planning to repeal Obamacare's individual mandate, which will lead to an estimated 13 million fewer people having insurance and higher premiums, according to the CBO.

But the mandate is also by far the least popular part of Obamacare, the foundation of much of the GOP's opposition to the law. Might they now be content to let repeal go, once they nix the mandate, while leaving the more popular pieces of the law in place?

One lobbyist compared it to Democrats passing Obamacare in 2010. They knew it was unpopular at the time. But they had committed to passing it. It was a "suicide pact" of sorts. Republicans face a similar choice now.

"Looking at the polls and their majorities, do they decide to go after (fill in the blank with the ACA, Medicare, Medicaid, or all of the above) because they know they may never get another chance?" this person said. "It makes no sense, but when does a suicide pact make sense?"

But with the stunning Democratic win in Alabama yesterday, the math might simply be insurmountable. We'll be watching closely, of course, but at long last, Obamacare repeal might really be finished.

Chart of the Day

Avalere

Obamacare enrollment has fallen behind. At this point, it's pretty much impossible to see how sign-ups for 2018 could catch up to 2016 or 2017 levels. It would probably require about 3 million people to enroll in the last week.

Kliff’s Notes

“Why This Is Obamacare’s Do-Or-Die Week”: “'This week is the entire ball game,' the Kaiser Family Foundation’s Larry Levitt told TPM. 'A growing enrollment means a healthier risk pool. Declining enrollment means a sicker risk pool. What happens this week will also determine the political narrative about whether the ACA is succeeding or failing.'” —Alice Ollstein, Talking Points Memo

“House GOP lawmakers look to delay Cadillac tax, other ACA taxes”: “The Affordable Care Act taxes are all on the U.S. House of Representatives' chopping block. Republicans on the House Ways and Means Committee introduced a bundle of bills on Tuesday to delay the Cadillac tax, employer mandate and other taxes that healthcare industry groups have opposed.” —Susannah Luthi, Modern Healthcare

“GOP chairman: CHIP must be attached to next funding bill”: “House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Greg Walden (R-Ore.) said Tuesday that funding for a major children's health insurance program needs to be included in a short-term funding bill later this month. The comments from Walden, whose panel oversees the Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP), add urgency to the push to renew authorization for the program covering 9 million children.” —Peter Sullivan, the Hill

Analysis and longer reads

“The health care merger arms race”: “Executives say the deals will save money and improve care. But independent research does not support those claims, and the deals raise questions about whether some companies are gaining excessive power or undermining rivals.” —Bob Herman, Axios

“Why Do So Many People Hate Obamacare So Much?”: “The Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, has roiled America since the day it was signed into law in 2010. From the start, the public was almost evenly divided between those who supported it and those who opposed it. They still are.” —Julie Rovner, Kaiser Health News

“People Don’t Take Their Pills. Only One Thing Seems to Help.”: “When drugs cost them less, patients are more likely to fill prescriptions. Even if people have already purchased drugs, they may skip doses — or split the pills — because of concerns that they won’t be able to afford future refills.” —Austin Frakt, The Incidental Economist

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President Trump hasn’t succeeded in repealing Obamacare yet. But his administration is doing its best to force the law to fail.

The most critical time of the year for the health care law is open enrollment, when millions of people log on to online marketplaces, check whether they qualify for federal subsidies to help them pay their premiums, and shop for plans. For the past three years, at least 10 million people have gotten insurance that way each year.

Open enrollment is almost over: It ends Friday, December 15, in most states. So far, sign-ups have been somewhat strong in the face of the Trump administration’s overt sabotage. As of Dec. 9, 4.7 million people had signed up for insurance on the federal marketplace.

But they still seem likely to fall short of previous years. We can expect about 1.6 million to be automatically enrolled in a new plan at the end of open enrollment, if they haven’t actively selected a new one, based on the last two years. It would require an almost-unfathomable surge in the last week for 2018 enrollment on HealthCare.gov to match the 9.2 million in 2017. Something closer to 7.5 million or 8 million is looking more plausible.

"We expect enrollment to grow every year, not to shrink. This market is likely to shrink," Caroline Pearson, senior vice president at Avalere, a consulting firm, told me last week. "It is a big deal, for a market that's already too small and unstable."

Avalere

The difference is Trump. This year, open enrollment was in the hands of a White House that’s openly hostile to the Affordable Care Act — and the Trump administration took advantage of the best opportunity it had to undercut the law.

President Trump has said Obamacare is imploding, which he hopes would reignite the stalled congressional effort to repeal it. He didn’t just sit around waiting for that to happen. His administration halved the length of open enrollment. They slashed spending on advertising and assistance programs. They pulled out of outreach events at the last minute.

The entire health care law could be at stake. Advertising and outreach are primarily targeted to younger and healthier people, who are essential to the law’s goal of affordable insurance coverage for all Americans. If their enrollment drops while older, sicker people keep signing up, premiums are going to increase even more next year.

It could be the start of a death spiral, a self-perpetuating cycle of price hikes and falling enrollment — which is exactly what Trump seems to want.

“I think what this cumulative activity can do is start that death spiral,” Kathleen Sebelius, President Obama’s health and human services secretary during the ACA’s first open enrollment, told me.

Obamacare supporters had already conceded that as a result of these cuts, they likely won’t be able to match last year’s 12 million sign-ups. “I don’t actually think that’s possible anymore,” Lori Lodes, who worked on Obamacare enrollment in the Obama administration, told me.

We will know soon exactly how much the White House has succeeded in gutting Obamacare. By embracing this strategy, the Trump administration has put its political goals ahead of the millions of people who depend on the ACA for insurance.

“I really do think what they want to be able to do is come out on December 16 and say, ‘See, we told you Obamacare is imploding; it’s failing,’” Lodes said. “When the reality is they are going to be responsible because of the decisions they’ve made to undermine open enrollment.”

Open enrollment and outreach, explained

Every fall, the Obamacare insurance marketplaces open for business. People have a few weeks to log on, check out their options, and sign up for coverage. This year, sign-ups started on November 1 and closes on December 15.

An entire apparatus exists to support open enrollment. Most states use the federal Healthcare.gov, while a few run their own marketplaces. The feds and some states run call centers, where people can talk to a real person to walk through enrollment. The federal government funds navigator and in-person assistance programs, which set up places where people can get help navigating the sign-up process.

Open enrollment didn’t technically changed much this year, except it was shortened from 12 weeks to six. Otherwise, it is pretty much the same. Healthcare.gov is still open. People can still get tax subsidies and shop for coverage. All of the ACA’s regulations, such as protections for people with preexisting conditions and the requirement that insurers cover essential health benefits, remain in place.

But the mere need to clarify that, yes, Obamacare is still around is a big problem for open enrollment. After eight months of Republicans fighting to repeal it while claiming it’s failing, people like Lodes worry that many Americans think the law either is already gone or won’t be around for much longer.

Which is why outreach is so important.

The Obama administration went all out every year to promote open enrollment. President Obama appeared on late-night TV and viral online shows. The administration recruited celebrities to star in ads or highlight open enrollment on social media. Senior officials scrounged for as much money for the navigator program as they could find.

While things didn’t always go smoothly — the launch of Healthcare.gov was a disaster — the efforts helped 12 million people sign up for coverage in 2016. The uninsured rate has dropped to historic lows, and insurers have started to see improved business on the law’s marketplaces.

The key, Lodes said, was blanketing people with information — from television ads and email and text message reminders to working with community-based groups and churches. The biggest barrier was convincing people they could actually afford insurance, once the law’s financial assistance was accounted for.

Outreach works: The Huffington Post reported recently that an internal Health and Human Services Department report concluded that 37 percent of sign-ups in the last few months of 2016 could be attributed to outreach.

Trump administration officials have defended their outreach cuts in part by arguing that people are already familiar with Obamacare after three years. “I don’t think we can force people to sign up for a program,” a senior administration official told reporters in August.

But that runs counter to the available evidence. Nearly 40 percent of the US uninsured were still unaware of the marketplaces last year, and almost half did not know they might be eligible for financial assistance, according to surveys by the Commonwealth Fund.

“There is a difference knowing Obamacare is the law and knowing what you should do with that information,” Lodes said, “between knowing you need to sign up in this finite period of time or you do not get health coverage.”

The Commonwealth Fund

The Obama administration had assumed that older people or people with preexisting conditions who struggled to get insurance before the ACA would be eager to sign up. So they focused their efforts on reaching younger people or people who hadn’t had insurance before. Every year, people turn 26 and roll off their parents’ health insurance, or maybe they get a new job with a higher salary and need to move from Medicaid to private insurance.

Every year, in other words, there are brand new customers for the ACA marketplaces.

“They’re either the least familiar or they are the healthiest. Either way, they either don’t know or don’t believe they need or want health insurance,” Sebelius said. “For somebody to suggest that there is no persuasion needed is just nuts.”

How Trump sabotaged Obamacare enrollment

Because open enrollment is such a sprawling undertaking, the Trump administration has many tools at its disposal to undermine it and, by extension, the ACA. It seems to be using all of them.

The White House has some minimal requirements under federal law. It must perform outreach and education, it must run a call center, it must have a website where people can enroll, and it must operate a navigator program.

On paper, the Trump administration is doing each of those things. But each is facing significant cuts. Together, they add up to a clear picture of an administration using every means available to drop support for ACA enrollment:

Just a few weeks into the Trump administration, HHS announced it would reduce open enrollment from 12 weeks to six weeks.

Over the summer, Trump administration officials hinted they might not enforce the individual mandate.

In August, HHS said it would cut funding for Obamacare advertising by 90 percent, from $100 million to $10 million.

HHS also said it would cut funding for in-person assistance by 40 percent.

A few weeks later, the department let the in-person assistance budget run out entirely without awarding more money.

Late last month, the administration abruptly pulled out of state-level open enrollment events.

This month, Trump stopped federal payments to health insurers just days before open enrollment began, driving up premiums as much as 30 percent for some plans.

HHS has cut off relationships with Latino groups that had worked with the Obama administration to enroll that population in coverage, Talking Points Memo has reported.

In other words, the Trump administration cut funding for outreach, cut funding for enrollment assistance, and dropped out of partnerships to support enrollment, while shrinking the window for people to sign up for coverage, sowing doubts about whether people will be required to have insurance, and taking actions that drive up premiums.

So as Trump claims Obamacare is failing, his administration set up a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Obamacare supporters have tried to fill the gaps with grassroots programs like the Get Covered campaign, run by former Obama administration officials. But they do not have the same resources as the federal government.

The Commonwealth Fund

The ideal TV advertising campaign, for example, would cost about $15 million, said Lodes, who is helping to oversee Get Covered. They knew from the very start that they would not be able to raise that kind of money, which means the hole left by the Trump administration cutting $90 million from the ACA’s advertising budget will go largely unfilled.

“There is no way that anything we do or anyone else does can fill the footprint of what the administration should be doing,” she said. “They were unable to get repeal passed through the Congress, so they really seem intent to do everything they can do to make sure open enrollment is not successful.”

Weak enrollment is a huge threat to Obamacare’s future

The inevitable result of the Trump administration’s actions will be fewer Americans with health insurance. Last year, 12 million people signed up for coverage through the Obamacare marketplaces. Nobody expects to match that number this year, after open enrollment has been so severely undermined. Pro-Obamacare advocates had projected at least 1 million fewer people will enroll this year. Bases on the latest numbers, it looks like they were right.

“There is no doubt that the actions by the administration will mean that fewer people get covered,” Lodes said.

The number of uninsured Americans will likely tick up from its current historic lows. Hundreds of thousands or even millions will not be financially protected against a medical emergency, and it will be harder for them to afford the routine health care that prevents bigger problems later on. That will have a real effort on people’s lives and financial security.

But falling enrollment also threatens Obamacare’s future.

The law works when younger, healthier people and older, sicker people all sign up for coverage. Insurers need the low-cost patients to help cover the costs of the sicker ones, who are more likely to rack up big medical bills. The ACA has both sticks (the individual mandate) and carrots (cheaper premiums for young people and generous subsidies) to get everybody into the market.

But getting younger and healthier people takes a little more effort. They have been the focus of the outreach that Trump is now cutting.

People who have medical conditions already or who are older and know they may soon need insurance are going to find a way to enroll regardless. But young and healthy people are less likely to think they need insurance. They need some persuading that the ACA’s coverage will help them in an unlikely medical event and that they will be able to afford it, Sebelius and Lodes said.

“The last person to sign up is probably the healthiest person to sign up,” David Anderson, a former insurance industry official who now researches at Duke University, told me.

With a sicker pool left behind, health insurers are likely to either increase premiums even more next year or leave the market altogether. Plans have already cited the marketing cuts as one reason for increased premiums in 2018. And the higher premiums get, the more difficult it is to persuade young and healthy people to pay the price.

“What that means over the long term is the health of the marketplace is at risk,” Lodes said.

No matter what the president says, Obamacare isn’t failing yet. But his administration is trying as hard as it can to make those words a reality.

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It will most likely take a few weeks for Jones to be sworn into the Senate.

Doug Jones just scored a stunning victory as a Democrat in Alabama’s Senate race. The next big question is when he will take his seat in the Senate.

The timing matters because Jones’s victory narrows the Republican majority in the Senate to a tenuous 51 votes. Congressional Republicans are about to vote on a sweeping overhaul of the tax system that would slash taxes for corporations permanently, for individuals temporarily, and add more than $1 trillion to the national debt over the next decade.

But if Congress votes on the bill next week, it’s likely Jones won’t yet be there to vote for it. The timeline indicates Jones should be sworn in early January at the earliest — but there are still a couple of potential roadblocks.

It takes some time to officially certify the election results: Counties must officially file their election results by Friday, December 22, according to the Alabama Secretary of State’s office. John Bennett, chief of staff for the Alabama secretary of state, told Reuters that some counties might miss that deadline, which would mean December 26 would be the earliest for the final results to be certified.

Right now, the Republicans’ biggest legislative priority is getting their tax bill passed. They had promised to deliver it to President Trump before the end of the year. The House and Senate have reportedly reached a final agreement — but it’s not clear if all of GOP senators who voted for it initially are still on board. Jones’s victory could potentially upend that plan if the party can’t reach a final deal by the time he becomes a senator.

As Vox’s Dylan Scott writes, the Republicans passed the bill with 51 Republican votes. Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN) defected — the only Republican to do so. But Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) is beginning to push back, which would drop the vote count down to 50. Without Jones, Republicans can still pass the bill — Vice President Mike Pence will break the tie. But if Jones shows up in time:

This path to failure has become clear: Jones wins in Alabama on Tuesday, the tax negotiations drag on long enough for him to be seated, and Collins flips to a “no” vote because her extracted concessions on health care fall through.with their current numbers.

As Scott points out, this is the best-case scenario for Democrats. But Republicans also can do the math, and will push hard to deliver the tax bill before Jones arrives.

So far, McConnell hasn’t indicated that he’d delay seating Jones. But Senate Democrats are clearly worried that he will, and are pushing for Jones to be seated as soon as possible:

Doug Jones should be seated without delay. The people of Alabama have a right to be represented by the person they elected in this tax debate.

A similar debate played out in 2010, after Republican Scott Brown won a surprise victory in the Massachusetts Senate special election and deprived Democrats of a 60-vote, filibuster-proof majority in the Senate.

One option for Democrats was to push the health care bill through before Brown was seated. But then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said the day after the election that they wouldn’t act on health care until Brown was sworn in.

So far, McConnell has made no such assurance on the tax bill.

Moore hasn’t conceded yet. What does that mean?

On Tuesday night, after Jones’s victory speech, Republican Roy Moore refused to concede, saying “when the vote is this close that it's not over” and calling for a recount. Typically, a campaign demanding a recount also pushes to delay the swearing-in until after the recount is finished, which could hold up Jones being seated.

Recounts can only happen after the election results have been certified, according to AL.com, so the recount wouldn’t delay certification.

It’s not entirely clear, though, if the Alabama law even applies to candidates for federal office, as Rick Hasen writes at the Election Law Blog. And Merrill told CNN that it’s “highly unlikely” that the outcome of the vote will change. “There's not a whole lot of mistakes that are made,” he said.

“You take a picture of somebody, it says one thing. You draw a picture ... it says something completely different.”

Some of my favorite films of recent years have come from the Irish studio Cartoon Saloon, a production house that has turned out three animated films, all of which I’ve loved, and two of which have been Oscar-nominated for Best Animated Feature (the third is eligible for the next Oscar ceremony).

The Secret of Kells, an enchanting Celtic myth mash-up, led the way in 2009, with 2014’s Song of the Sea deepening that film’s storytelling techniques and themes, to heartbreaking effect. The studio’s latest release, The Breadwinner, newly in theaters throughout the country, takes on a story that wouldn’t seem a natural fit for animation — the lives of young girls amid the perpetual turmoil of Taliban-ruled Afghanistan — and turns it into a surprisingly profound story of the power of fiction, the bonds of family, and the weight of history. It’s my favorite animated film of 2017.

The Breadwinner marks the solo directorial debut for Nora Twomey, who co-directed Kells and worked on the story of Sea. The film has been adapted from the book of the same name by Deborah Ellis, and it follows the story of Parvana, a girl forced to pose as a boy to make ends meet for her family when her father is taken to prison. As she works to help her family, and find her father, the drums of war beat in the distance, culminating in a suitably dramatic climax.

For as much as The Breadwinner juggles, both in its story and thematically, it’s a little surprising that the film is an animated one. Certainly a story like this, one almost entirely about normal, everyday human beings, could have been done in live-action. And typically it would have been done in live-action.

So when Twomey joined me for the latest episode of my podcast, I Think You’re Interesting, I asked her that exact question. And her answer was perhaps the most succinct explanation I’ve heard for why animation can unlock new ways of thinking about any story, not just stories about cartoon animals going on adventures. She says:

Animation allows you to empathize with characters in a very unique way I think that live action can’t. There is something about drawing a face and expressing a face with a few lines I think which makes a character universal and makes a character easy for an individual to identify with.

For me, that’s a very exciting space as a filmmaker. To enter into that space, for me, that’s the most interesting thing. There had been a live-action film about bacha posh, the girls dressed as boys in Afghanistan, called Osama, which was released in 2003. Similar subject matter, but there’s something about animation that allowed us to layer the story as well in a way in which our audiences didn’t emotionally disengage from our characters, which might have been the case with live-action — or certainly would have been a different set of problems with live-action.

There’s also an opportunity with animation to express things. You take a picture of somebody, it says one thing. You draw a picture of that person in the same circumstances, and it says something completely different. It’s difficult to express, but it’s easy to experience.

For much more with Twomey, including discussion of finding Afghan-Canadian actors to play the roles in the film, directing a baby to say just the right things, and designing what has to be the skinniest horse in the history of cinema, listen to the full episode.

When Democrat Doug Jones won Alabama’s hotly contested Senate special election on Tuesday night, observers on Twitter were quick to point one thing out: Jones’s victory was most likely due to high black turnout, particularly among black women.

Despite fears of the reduced turnout often seen in an off-cycle elections, belief that the Jones campaign made missteps in its black outreach, and concerns that voter suppression tactics in the state could reduce the number of black voters able to cast ballots, black voters made a commanding display of political power on Tuesday night, according to preliminary exit polls. In a state where African Americans usually make up one-fourth of the electorate, the initial exit polls suggested that they exceeded that turnout rate, with early numbers putting them at 30 percent of Tuesday’s electorate.

Observers noted that the result was a powerful reminder of the power of black women’s votes. The results also come months after the Democratic Party engaged in a highly public debate about the significance of “identity politics,” with some arguing that the party was taking black women for granted as it pursued the votes of working-class white voters.

On Wednesday, Democratic National Committee Chairman Tom Perez, noted that the election was further evidence of black women being “the backbone of the Democratic Party.”

Let me be clear: We won in Alabama and Virginia because #BlackWomen led us to victory. Black women are the backbone of the Democratic Party, and we can’t take that for granted. Period.

Alabama’s Senate race isn’t the first election this year where a strong turnout among black voters, led by black women, helped determine an election. In a performance that closely matched their 2013 behavior in the state, black women in Virginia helped keep the governor’s mansion in Democratic hands, with 91 percent of their vote going to Ralph Northam last month. They also showed the strongest support for the winning Democratic gubernatorial candidate in New Jersey. And while Hillary Clinton did not win the 2016 election, black women overwhelmingly supported her, backing her by a 94-6 margin over Donald Trump and other candidates.

On social media last night, some observers noted that black women were voting for Doug Jones in an effort to “save America,” which some critics argued puts too much of a burden on black women.

This narrative about Black voters "saving" Alabama would imply that majority of white voters--the majority of people in the state--wanted to be "saved" from Moore. They didn't. Black voters protected themselves

But in a state where a disproportionate level ofAfrican-Americans face rampant poverty, poor education systems, and unequal access to healthcare, the votes of black women weren’t about some altruistic mission to save America from itself. Their votes were a very real attempt to make a change that would help themselves and their families.

They were also counteractinga candidate who argued that America was last “great” when slavery was in place, responded affirmatively when asked if constitutional amendments after the 10th should be abolished, and was backed by a president who has engaged in vitriolic attacks against prominent black women while pursuing legislation that would harm them. The results outline why they were such a powerful political force that should be focused on beyond election season.

Black women are not political mules to be used every time a mediocre white candidate needs to win. No amount of verbal appreciation will do us justice. Turn over the money, resources and power, then we can talk.

Can you imagine what would be possible if the DNC and political funders actually turned over resources and support to Black organizers, Black politicos, and Black woman leaders? We can vote. We can also lead, change, and transform nations. Invest in black people.

Alabama’s Senate race is only the latest election in which black women made the difference. If their high levels of turnout remain surprising, it’s because we aren’t looking to them in the first place.

Doug Jones’s victory over Roy Moore Tuesday night in Alabama’s special election for US Senate was enough of a shock that most political pundits didn’t have ready-made explanations for why it happened. So in the aftermath, they’re poring over what little data they have to determine which groups of voters helped push Jones over the top by showing up to vote for him, and who hurt Moore worst by staying home.

The easiest way to draw these conclusions is to look at the exit polls conducted while Alabamians were voting. The exit polls are, in some ways, more detailed than the official voting tallies. And because they break down votes by demographic groups, they can often present ready-made narratives — like the idea in Alabama that black voters, and especially black women (who made up 18 percent of the electorate but voted 97 percent to 3 percent for Jones) “saved” the election for the Democratic Party.

One huge problem with interpretations based on exit polls in the Alabama special election is that pollsters simply didn’t conduct exit polls in the state in 2016, so it’s difficult to say how much of what happened in the state is due to, say, energized black turnout versus depressed white turnout.

Exit polls can be useful. But there’s also good reason to be a little skeptical of using them to interpret a vote after the fact — because that’s not what they’re designed to do. Here’s what you need to know.

How the exit poll works

Every November election — and during particularly important special elections, like Tuesday’s Senate election in Alabama — exit polls are conducted by a group of media outlets called the National Election Pool: NBC, CBS, ABC, Fox, CNN, and the Associated Press. They hire a pollster to conduct the exit poll, but they're the ones that own the information — and that get to be the first to report the results.

That is the key to the exit poll. It is designed to allow the media to know as quickly as possible who has won the election. That means that when designing the poll, pollsters don’t focus on collecting as much data as possible — they focus on collecting the smallest amount of data that’s still going to reliably predict who has gotten more votes.

In a national election, that means that safe red or blue states (like Alabama) don’t get the full attention of exit pollsters. Exit pollsters still send people to do interviews there, for the purpose of the national poll, but they don’t collect enough interviews to publish reliable poll results.

So in addition to all the other factors that made the Senate special election so hard for pollsters to predict, the exit poll had the added factor of working in a state that it hadn’t held operations in for several years. That’s one good reason to be skeptical that it perfectly captured the state of the electorate.

The actual polling happens in two parts.

The most visible part of the poll happens in person on Election Day. An army of thousands of interviewers are sent to hundreds of polling places around the country. Interviewers approach a certain number of voters who are leaving the polling place — the exact fraction surveyed is secret — and ask them to fill out the written exit poll survey. In 2016, pollsters estimated they’d interview about 85,000 people on Election Day around the country — obviously, the number in Alabama in 2017 would be much smaller.

But part of the exit poll has already happened before Election Day. As early voting has become more popular, it's gotten harder to predict vote totals just by talking to people who vote on Election Day. So for the past several elections, exit pollsters have started calling people and asking if they voted early or absentee, and then conducting exit poll interviews by phone. (In 2016, pollsters estimated they’d contact about 16,000 voters this way.)

What the exit poll can — and can’t — tell us

The exit poll isn’t just about whom people voted for — that’s why there are interviewers even in safe states. Voters are asked to provide basic demographic information like gender, age, and ethnicity. Furthermore, they're asked some questions about their personal viewpoints and behaviors — like their religion and churchgoing habits — and questions about major issues facing the country.

That means the exit poll data is actually more detailed, in some ways, than the official US Census vote tallies that come out several weeks after the election. It can offer the first hints — and often the most important ones — to what voters thought this election was about. That's very important to pundits as they try to interpret what it means.

In 2004, for example, post-election chatter focused on "values voters." Voters who attended religious services regularly had overwhelmingly voted for George W. Bush. That narrative came out of the exit poll data.

Of course, what voters say is important to them is partly what campaigns have told voters is important. There's political science research suggesting that when a campaign hammers particular issues, those are the issues that the candidate's supporters say are most important to them. But the exit poll is still the best opportunity the national media has, in some ways, to figure out who voted, why, and how.

That said, there are some big questions about using the exit poll to draw sweeping conclusions. The first problem is that the exit poll only covers people who actually voted — meaning that it can obscure turnout problems on one side or the other.

In Alabama, for example, the exit poll showed that white voters overwhelmingly supported Roy Moore — but without more information about how many white voters stayed home because they were unwilling to support Moore, it’s hard to draw a conclusion about the role white voters played in the election.

For the most part, though, the exit poll is a lot more reliable when it comes to white voters than when it comes to nonwhite voters. And this is where it becomes really important to understand the exit poll’s limitations when talking about Doug Jones’s election.

The exit polls’ blind spots make it hard for them to analyze voters of color

There are some particular challenges that exit polls have faced for the past several elections that they still haven't found a way to work out. And as it happens, those challenges tend to involve voters of color.

Early voters. The phone poll for early voters is a relatively new addition to the exit poll— and it’s still a relatively minor one, compared with in-person polling. Early voting itself, meanwhile, has gotten very popular very quickly. In key states like Nevada and Florida, it’s estimated that fewer people will show up to vote on Election Day than showed up during early voting.

The exit poll understands the huge role early voters will play — pollsters estimated to Pew that 35 to 40 percent of all voting would happen early in 2016 — but it’s not clear that their polling can accurately capture who those people are. It runs into the problems any phone poll has — namely, that it's difficult to poll people who only have mobile phones.

No exit pollster here!

Networks can work around the early-voting blind spot when they’re using the exit poll for its intended purpose — which is, again, calling the race accurately as soon as possible. In areas where they know early voting has been heavy, they can delay calling close races even if the exit poll suggests one candidate will win. But the demographic and other data the exit poll provides might be skewed in favor of people who voted in person — who might not be the voters who decided this election.

Small groups. Like any poll, the smaller a sample size is, the less likely it is to be representative. So the exit poll is pretty reliable when it comes to large demographics (men, women, Democrats, Republicans) but less reliable when it gets to small demographics (young voters, Jewish voters).

Voters of color. In addition to the general problems with smaller voting demographics, analysts believe the exit poll has a tendency to oversample a particular kind of voter of color — the kind who lives in majority-white areas.

Here's the logic. Even though the public doesn't know exactly how the exit poll chooses where to go, it's possible to make some educated guesses. The exit poll is trying to predict the margin of victory for one candidate over another across the state. So when it decides which polling places to put interviewers outside of, it's reasonable to assume that it's choosing lots of swing precincts — precincts that are harder to predict and likely to affect the outcome. Those are going to be largely white precincts.

Alternatively, says Matt Barreto of Latino Decisions, exit pollsters might choose a precinct as a benchmark based on the previous cycle. For example, if a precinct voted for the Democratic senator 70 percent to 30 percent in 2008, the pollster might choose to put an exit poll interviewer at that precinct to see if the Democrat is getting less than 70 percent of the vote this time around. But pollsters are not necessarily paying attention to the racial makeup of those precincts.

Here's why this is a problem: The voters of color that pollsters run into in majority-white precincts might not be representative of the voters of color across the state. In particular, according to Latino Decisions, voters of color living among whites are "more assimilated, better educated, higher income, and more conservative than other minority voters."

Check out the difference in the percentage of nonwhite voters who had a college degree in 2010, according to the US Census versus the exit poll:

Latino Decisions

(The problem is even worse for Latino voters, because exit polls are almost never offered in Spanish — even though more than a quarter of Latino voters prefer Spanish to English. So the exit polls oversample English-speaking Latinos.)

When it comes to the Alabama election, it certainly doesn’t look like the exit pollsters overstated the conservatism of black voters. But they might have made incorrect assumptions about what share of the electorate black men and black women made up, based on where they saw black voters at the polls. Conversely, it’s possible that they overstated the conservatism of certain white groups — like white voters without college degrees — because they were polling in more affluent “swing” areas, where such voters would be more conservative.

Any errors the exit poll made were probably on the margins. It is almost certainly still the case that white voters strongly supported Moore and black voters overwhelmingly supported Jones. But the bigger conclusions one tries to draw from a single race, the more important it is to recognize the limitations of what we know about what actually happened there.

On October 5, the New York Times published an exposé alleging that Harvey Weinstein, one of Hollywood’s most revered moguls and influential kingpins, has been sexually harassing and abusing women for nearly 30 years. On October 10, the New Yorker followed with another extensive report, including several graphic, on-the-record accounts from more of Weinstein’s alleged victims. Just a couple of hours later, the Times followed up its own report with yet more public accounts, including from industry stalwarts Gwyneth Paltrow and Angelina Jolie.

Together, the allegations indicate that Weinstein may have abused his power on a variety of fronts over decades, and identifya pattern of behavior in which Weinstein often invited women to hotels for “business meetings,” only to make sexual advances against their will. Most of the women Weinstein allegedly targeted were young and had little institutional power, and they say they were afraid to speak out afterward for fear that he would ruin their careers.

Comprising both specific incidents of assault and ongoing harassment and suggestive behavior, the list of women accusing Weinstein is long — and as more women speak up, it’s likely to get longer. Here are all the women who have so far gone on record alleging that Weinstein sexually harassed and abused them, presented alphabetically. Please be advised that the details below include explicit and disturbing accounts of sexual assault.

This list will be updated as necessary. The most recent addition to the list is Salma Hayek.

He behaved inappropriately and propositioned a “personal” relationship to further my career whilst bragging about other actresses he had “helped” in a similar way. He told me not to tell anyone I was alone with him, told me if I did it might affect my “opportunities.” He tried to take my hand and put it on his lap which is when I managed to leave the room. [Amber Anderson / Instagram]

"I was in my dressing gown and I answered the door to find Harvey standing there," she said.

"He pushed me inside and rammed me up against the coat rack in my tiny hall and started fumbling at my gown. He was trying to kiss me and shove inside me. It was disgusting."

She said she tried to push him away but was unable to as he was too heavy.

"Finally I just gave up. At least I was able to stop him kissing me. As he ground himself against me, I kept my eyes shut tight, held my breath, just let him get on with it. He came over my leg like a dog and then left. It was pathetic, revolting. I remember lying in the bath later and crying." [CNN]

First at the Hôtel du Cap-Eden-Roc in France in 1997, and then multiple times through 1999:

At first, Weinstein was solicitous, praising her work. Then he left the room. When he returned, he was wearing a bathrobe and holding a bottle of lotion. “He asks me to give a massage. I was, like, ‘Look man, I am no fucking fool,’” Argento said. “But, looking back, I am a fucking fool. And I am still trying to come to grips with what happened.”

Argento said that, after she reluctantly agreed to give Weinstein a massage, he pulled her skirt up, forced her legs apart, and performed oral sex on her as she repeatedly told him to stop. Weinstein “terrified me, and he was so big,” she said. “It wouldn’t stop. It was a nightmare.” [New Yorker]

Arquette recalled that, when she arrived at the room, Weinstein opened the door wearing a white bathrobe. Weinstein said that his neck was sore and that he needed a massage. She told him that she could recommend a good masseuse. “Then he grabbed my hand,” she said. He put it on his neck. When she yanked her hand away, she told me, Weinstein grabbed it again and pulled it toward his penis, which was visible and erect. “My heart was really racing. I was in a fight-or-flight moment,” she said. She told Weinstein, “I will never do that.” [New Yorker]

Weinstein invited her to a business meeting at the Peninsula. When she arrived, he asked her over the phone to come up to his room. ... Barth said that, in the conversation that followed, he alternated between offering to cast her in a film and demanding a naked massage in bed. “So, what would happen if, say, we’re having some champagne and I take my clothes off and you give me a massage?” she recalled him asking. “And I’m, like, ‘That’s not going to happen.’ ”

When she moved toward the door to leave, Weinstein lashed out, saying that she needed to lose weight “to compete with Mila Kunis,” and then, apparently in an effort to mollify her, promising a meeting with one of his female executives. “He gave me her number, and I walked out and I started bawling.” [New Yorker]

I was called to meet Harvey Weinstein at the Savoy Hotel when I was 17. I assumed it would be in a conference room which was very common. When I arrived, reception told me to go to his room . He opened the door in his bathrobe. I was incredibly naive and young and it did not cross my mind that this older, unattractive man would expect me to have any sexual interest in him. After declining alcohol and announcing that I had school in the morning I left, uneasy but unscathed. A few years later he asked me if he had tried anything with me in that first meeting. I realized he couldn't remember if he had assaulted me or not. [Kate Beckinsale / Instagram]

Juls Bindi (massage therapist)

At Weinstein’s suite at Los Angeles’s Montage Hotel in 2010:

“He cut the massage short. He gets up, and he just says, ‘How big is my penis?’ I was like, ‘Excuse me?’

“He follows me into the bathroom. He shuts the door behind him.”

Then, Bindi says, he proceeds to pleasure himself.

“I’m like, ‘This is not appropriate, I don’t feel comfortable with this, no, this is not okay, do not do this in front of me.’ He grabbed me and starting groping my chest, and I pushed him away. I was stunned! What do you do in a situation like that? You have this guy who’s overpowering you. What can you do? He said, ‘Do you want a book deal or not?’” [ABC News]

Harvey left the room, but not for long. He re-emerged naked a couple of minutes later and asked if I would give him a massage. Panicking, in shock, I remember weighing up the options and wondering how much I needed to placate him to keep myself safe. He asked if I would like a massage instead, and for a second I thought this might be a way to give him an inch without him taking a mile.

I told him I was uncomfortable and that I was angry that I had been tricked into this position. He pleaded with me to let him massage me and I let him put his hands on my shoulders while my mind raced. [Medium]

For 40 years, Cynthia Burr has almost never talked about the time she met Mr. Weinstein.

But she didn’t forget how he greeted her in the lobby of a beautiful old building in New York City. How he tried to kiss her in the elevator. And how, she said, he unzipped his fly and forced her to perform oral sex on him in a hallway.

“It was just him and me alone,” she said. “I was fearful I didn’t have the wherewithal to get away.” [NYT]

“He sat down, chatted for a few minutes and then excused himself and left the room through a far door, where I could see a short passage that connected to the bedroom and the bathroom. I assumed he had gone for a pee,” she said. “I could hear him moving around and suddenly the sound of bath taps running. ‘What do you say we both jump in the bath?’ he hollered. I could hear the thump of shoes being taken off and felt shocked that the meeting had turned sleazy.” [People]

He told me that he has a lot of 'special friends' and they give each other massages. It was a full court press. He wanted me to be one of his 'special friends' and go into the bedroom. I told him that I had a serious boyfriend and reminded him that he was married and that we should keep this professional. I was so blindsided. Not one ounce of me anticipated it. It was the weirdest meeting I've ever had in my life. [Hollywood Reporter]

He started to tell me that he found me very attractive and wanted to have relations with me. I told him I was very in love with my companion. He replied that didn’t bother him at all and offered to have me be his mistress a few days a year. That way we could continue to work together. Basically, it was, ‘If you want to continue in America, you have to go through me.’ [Le Parisien]

As they got to his room, she received a telephone call from one of her colleagues, and Weinstein disappeared into a bathroom, leaving the door open. She assumed that he was washing his hands.

“When I hung up the phone, I heard the shower go on in the bathroom,” she said. “I was, like, What the fuck, is he taking a shower?” Weinstein came out, naked and with an erection. “What are you doing?” she asked. Weinstein demanded that she lie on the bed and told her that many other women had done so before her. [New Yorker]

When I first started to work as an actress, i was working on a film and I received a call from‎ Harvey Weinstein asking if I had slept with any of the women I was seen out with in the media. It was a very odd and uncomfortable call ...

... A year or two later, I went to a meeting with him in the lobby of a hotel with a director about an upcoming film. The director left the meeting and Harvey asked me to stay and chat with him ... He then invited me to his room. I quickly declined and asked his assistant if my car was outside. She said it wasn't and wouldn't be for a bit and I should go to his room. At that moment I felt very powerless and scared but didn't want to act that way hoping that I was wrong about the situation. When I arrived I was relieved to find another woman in his room and thought immediately I was safe. He asked us to kiss and she began some sort of advances upon his direction. I swiftly got up and asked him if he knew that I could sing. And I began to sing. I thought it would make the situation better, more professional, like an audition. [Cara Delevingne / Instagram]

As soon as I was in there, I realised it was a terrible mistake. I got to the hotel room, I remember talk of a massage and I thought that was pretty gross. I think he showed me his big back and I found that pretty horrid.

Then before I knew it, he started trying to pull my clothes off and pin me down and I just kept saying, “No, no, no.” But he was really forceful. I remember him pulling at my trousers and stuff and looming over me and I just sort of – I am a big, strong girl and I bolted … ran for the bathroom and locked the door.

I was in there for a while, I think. He went very quiet. After a while I remember opening the door and seeing him just there facing the door, masturbating, so I quickly closed the door again and locked it. Then when I heard room service come to the door, I just ran. [The Guardian]

They were introduced through a mutual friend, in a casual and platonic setting, and she accepted his invitation to dine with him at the Peninsula. Esco viewed it as a chance to talk with a mentor about film craft. But toward the end of dinner, she said, Weinstein told her: “I think we should see a movie in the theater, like back in the day, and we should kiss.”

She brushed him off by saying she didn’t date older guys, but she said he pressed on — “It’s just a kiss” — and kept pressing.

“He tried to insinuate that everything would be easier for me if I went along,” Esco remembered. [Washington Post]

“Oddly, despite having heard endless stories about massages and hand-jobs in hotel rooms, it doesn’t even cross my mind — not for a second — that he might try the same on me,” she says. Weinstein complimented Gruffudd’s recent audition for one of his projects, then asked Evans to accompany him to the hotel bathroom. “Just go. I’m right behind you. I want to touch your tits. Kiss you a little,” he allegedly said. When Evans begged off, Weinstein told her, “Let’s hope it all works out for your boyfriend.” [Vulture]

Lucia Evans (former aspiring actress)

At Miramax’s New York City office in 2004:

In the meeting, Evans recalled, “he immediately was simultaneously flattering me and demeaning me and making me feel bad about myself.” Weinstein told her that she’d “be great in ‘Project Runway’ ” — the show, which Weinstein helped produce, premièred later that year — but only if she lost weight. He also told her about two scripts, a horror movie and a teen love story, and said one of his associates would discuss them with her.

“At that point, after that, is when he assaulted me,” Evans said. “He forced me to perform oral sex on him.” As she objected, Weinstein took his penis out of his pants and pulled her head down onto it. “I said, over and over, ‘I don’t want to do this, stop, don’t,’ ” she said. “I tried to get away, but maybe I didn’t try hard enough. I didn’t want to kick him or fight him.” In the end, she said, “He’s a big guy. He overpowered me.” [New Yorker]

"I had just arrived and I was sleeping, I was in my bed," she began. "I wake up and Harvey is standing above my bed. That alone is frightening."

She continued, "All of the sudden he takes his pants down and starts doing his stuff. He's blocking the door. I can't get out and he — I don't know how to say this on the radio, but he finishes on the carpet of the floor." [THR]

When they got to the Park Lane Hotel, Mr. Weinstein went to the check-in desk while she waited elsewhere in the lobby, Ms. Exiner d’Amore recalled. He returned and said there had been a mistake with the reservations; there was only one room. They would have to share.

“I gave him a look like that was ridiculous,” she recalled. But she ultimately agreed, assuming it was harmless. When she got into bed that night, she said, he slipped in next to her, naked.

“I told him no. I kept pushing him away. He just wouldn’t listen,” Ms. Exiner d’Amore said. “He just forced himself on me.” She said he forcibly performed oral sex and intercourse on her. [NYT]

You see, nothing happened to me with Harvey, [and] by that I mean, I escaped 5 times. I had two Peninsula hotel meetings in the evening with Harvey and all I remember was that I ducked, dived, and ultimately got out of there without getting slobbered over — well, just a bit. Yes, massage was suggested ... I remember him telling me all the actresses who had slept with him and what he had done for them. I wasn’t drinking the [Kool] Aid. I knew Harvey was a master manipulator. [Twitter]

“Like every other woman in the industry, I’ve had an ‘audition’ with Harvey Weinstein, where I’d actually already had the audition but you had to be personally approved by him,” said Garai. “So I had to go to his hotel room in the Savoy, and he answered the door in his bathrobe. I was only 18. I felt violated by it, it has stayed very clearly in my memory.” [The Guardian]

We went to his office and had a great conversation about his current film and about the film I was pitching. He seemed genuinely interested in the script I had co-written. After 30 minutes he excused himself to go to the bathroom.

He returned in a robe with the front open, buck-naked. He told me to keep talking about my film and that he was going to get into his hot tub which was in the room adjacent to his office, steps away. I kept talking as he got into the hot tub. When I finished my pitch, he asked me to watch him masturbate. I told him I was leaving. He quickly got out of the hot tub. As I went to get my purse to leave, he grabbed my forearm and pulled me to his bathroom and pleaded with me to watch him masturbate. My heart was racing and I was very scared. [Variety]

The details of what I have learned was not unique to me are out there now — the office tour that became an occasion to trap me in an empty meeting room, the begging for a massage, his hands on my shoulders as I attempted to beat a retreat … all while not wanting to alienate the most powerful man in Hollywood. [ACEs Connection]

At a breakfast meeting at the Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc, during the Cannes Film Festival in 1996:

Upstairs, he asked to give her a massage, Ms. Godrèche said. She said no. He argued that casual massages were an American custom — he gave them to his secretary all the time, Ms. Godrèche recalled him saying.

“The next thing I know, he’s pressing against me and pulling off my sweater,” she said. She pulled away and left the suite. [NYT]

Trish Goff (model)

At the Tribeca Grill in 2003:

Then he started asking me if I had a boyfriend, and if we had an open relationship. I said I wasn’t interested in an open relationship, but he was relentless, and I kept trying to shut that down and move on. Then he started putting his hands on my legs, and I said, “Can you stop doing that?” When we finally stood up to go, he really started groping me, grabbing my breasts, grabbing my face and trying to kiss me. I kept saying, “Please stop, please stop,” but he didn’t until I managed to get back into the public space. [NYT]

Weinstein was on his bed, saying he had a headache, she said. He asked her to lie down with him and asked her to take her shirt off so he could see her breasts, Gomes said. She left the room, and he followed in a bathrobe and started massaging her shoulders and neck despite her saying she didn’t want it, Gomes said.

“He would not stop. He just kept pushing his hands close to my chest forcefully until I finally was able to get up and away from him,” she wrote.

Weinstein told her, “You know, Gwyneth Paltrow and Ashley Judd were exactly where you are at one point. Look at them now,” Gomes recounted.

Gomes said she made an excuse to leave at that point, and Weinstein, at the door, grabbed her and tried to kiss her on the lips. She said she turned her head, and he sneered. She never saw or spoke to him again. [LAT]

There was a pile of scripts sitting on his desk. “I want to put you in one of my movies,” he said and offered to let me choose which one I liked best. Later in the conversation, he mentioned that he had an agreement with his wife. He could sleep with whomever he wanted when he was out of town. I walked out of the meeting feeling uneasy. There was no explicit mention that to star in one of those films I had to sleep with him, but the subtext was there.

A few weeks later, I was asked to do a follow-up meeting at his hotel. I called one of my actress friends to explain my discomfort with the situation, and she offered to come with me. En route, she called me to say she couldn’t make it. Not wanting to be at the hotel alone with him, I made up an excuse — I had an early morning and would have to postpone. Harvey told me that my actress friend was already at his hotel and that both of them would be very disappointed if I didn’t show. I knew he was lying, so I politely and apologetically reiterated that I could no longer come by. [Variety]

I met him for a business meeting in Paris at which he behaved inappropriately and I had to push him off. I got away without it going further, but the experience left me shocked and disgusted. [Eva Green/Twitter]

Ambra Battilana Gutierrez (model)

At Miramax’s New York City office:

In the office, she sat with Weinstein on a couch to review the portfolio, and he began staring at her breasts, asking if they were real. Gutierrez later told officers of the New York Police Department Special Victims Division that Weinstein then lunged at her, groping her breasts and attempting to put a hand up her skirt while she protested. He finally backed off and told her that his assistant would give her tickets to “Finding Neverland,” a Broadway musical that he was producing. He said that he would meet her at the show that evening.

Instead of going to the show that night, Gutierrez went to the nearest N.Y.P.D. precinct station and reported the assault. Weinstein telephoned her later that evening, annoyed that she had failed to appear at the show. [New Yorker]

In the “early aughts” at the Hôtel du Cap-Eden-Roc, and again “several years later”:

He called her over, and told her that he loved her work. Then he asked for her room number so that he could call her to schedule a meeting.

“That seemed pretty normal to me, you know, how people talk in business, and I didn’t know his reputation or anything,” Hannah said. She was in her room, already in her pajamas and getting ready for bed, when the phone calls started ... Though she didn’t pick up, she guessed that it was Weinstein. “And then, shortly thereafter, the knocking on the door began,” she told me. “It was sort of incessant, and then it started turning into pounding on my door,” she said. She was certain that it was Weinstein—as she recalls, she saw him through the peephole in the door. The pounding became so frightening that Hannah, who was staying on the ground floor, left her room via an exterior door. She spent the night in her makeup artist’s room.

The following evening, Hannah was in her room with the makeup artist, packing her things ahead of their departure the next morning, when the pounding on the door began again. “The knocking started again and again. And I was like, ‘oh shit,’ ” Hannah recalled. “We actually pushed a dresser in front of the door and just kind of huddled in the room.” [New Yorker, 10/27]

Mimi Haleyi (former production assistant):

At Weinstein’s New York City apartment in 2006:

She was escorted up to his apartment and it was not long before she says he was "all over me making sexual advances." She continued, "I told him 'no, no no,' but he insisted."

Haleyi says she then told him she was on her period and that there was "no way" anything was going to happen. "Please stop," she recalls saying.

"He wouldn't take no for an answer and backed me into a room which was not lit, but looked like a kid's bedroom with drawings on the walls," she said. "He held me down on the bed, I tried to get him off of me but it was impossible. He was extremely persistent and physically overpowering."

She continued, "He then orally forced himself on me while I was on my period. He even pulled my tampon out. I was in disbelief. I would not have wanted anyone to do that with me even if the person had been a romantic partner." [THR]

No to opening the door to him at all hours of the night, hotel after hotel, location after location, where he would show up unexpectedly, including one location where I was doing a movie he wasn’t even involved with. [NYT]

He asked me to meet for breakfast. We ate breakfast, we talked about films, film making. He asked me a few questions about the state of my love life. I shifted the conversation back to something less personal. Then he went to the loo. He came back and said, let’s go up to the room, I want to give you a script. We walked to the lift and the energy shifted ... I said to Harvey, I’m not interested in anything other than work, please don’t think I got in here with you for any other reason ...

He was silent after I spoke, furious. We got out of the lift and walked to his room. His hand was on my back, he was marching me forward ... he tried his key card and it didn’t work, then he got really angry. He walked me back ... he paid for my car and whispered in my ear, Don’t tell anyone about this, not your manager, not your agent. I got into my car and cried. [Lena Headey / Twitter]

According to Holly, Weinstein left the shower, dried off, and began approaching her while still naked.

“The adrenaline rush I felt, I wanted to flee, I was scared. He told me that I looked stressed and he thought maybe I could use a massage, maybe I could give him a massage. I began just sort of babbling like I was a child, I think it was just the fear.” She told him she didn’t have a massage license and that maybe they could call the front desk to have a masseuse come up.

Holly said Weinstein began to threaten her, stating that she needed to “keep him as [her] ally” and that it would be a “bad decision” if she left the room. At that point, Holly said, she “pushed him and ran.” [Variety]

Paz de la Huerta (actress)

In 2010, at de la Huerta’s apartment:

Actress Paz de la Huerta says that in October of 2010, Weinstein offered to give her a ride home to her New York City apartment, after a party, because the two lived in the same neighborhood.

She says Weinstein insisted they have drinks. The pair eventually ended up inside her apartment.

That's when she alleges Weinstein took off her dress and forced himself on her. [CBS]

At Weinstein’s suite at the Peninsula hotel in Beverly Hills in November 2010:

She says she was there to discuss her career, but that Weinstein quickly insisted that she give him a massage. She initially refused, but he was relentless and she ultimately agreed. Weinstein then suggested that he perform oral sex on her, the lawsuit states.

“Again, Weinstein displayed persistence and would not take ‘no’ for an answer,” according to the suit. “Weinstein initiated and Plaintiff froze as Weinstein removed her clothing and performed oral sex on her. Weinstein performed oral sex on Plaintiff for several minutes. After performing oral sex on Plaintiff, Weinstein masturbated in front of Plaintiff until he reached orgasm.” [Variety]

“I had a bad experience with Harvey Weinstein in my youth, and as a result, chose never to work with him again and warn others when they did,” Ms. Jolie said in an email. “This behavior towards women in any field, any country is unacceptable.” [NYT]

At a breakfast meeting in Weinstein’s Peninsula Beverly Hills hotel suite in the late 1990s:

Mr. Weinstein soon issued invitation after invitation, she said. Could he give her a massage? When she refused, he suggested a shoulder rub. She rejected that too, she recalled. He steered her toward a closet, asking her to help pick out his clothing for the day, and then toward the bathroom. Would she watch him take a shower? she remembered him saying.

“I said no, a lot of ways, a lot of times, and he always came back at me with some new ask,” Ms. Judd said. “It was all this bargaining, this coercive bargaining.” [NYT]

I met Harvey at an industry party. The following day, my agent said he wanted to see me for a general meeting. The location was set for his hotel room. I wasn’t comfortable with going to his room & said so. The following day, we sat down with an assistant in the hotel restaurant. He bullshit me for 5 minutes re: movies he could put me in, then asked the assistant to excuse us. As she walked away, he said, "I know you were feeling what I was feeling when we met the other night” and then regaled me with offers of a lavish life filled with trips around the world on private planes etc. IF I would be his girlfriend. Or, “We could just keep this professional.” All I knew was not to offend this very powerful man and to get out of the situation as quickly as possible. [Minka Kelly / Instagram]

He went to the bathroom, came back in a robe and asked her to give him a massage, she said. “Everybody does it,” he said, according to Ms. Kendall, and mentioned a famous model’s name. She refused; he left the room, and returned nude, she said.

“He literally chased me,” she said. “He wouldn’t let me pass him to get to the door.”

Ms. Kendall said his advances had a bargaining quality: He asked if she would at least show her breasts, if nothing else.

Heather Kerr (former actress)

At a private meeting, year and place undisclosed:

“He asked me if I was good," said Kerr. "I started to tell him about my training and acting experience and he said, ‘No. I need to know if you’re good.’ He said if he was going to introduce me around town he needed to know if I was 'good.' He kept repeating that word. I offered to provide him with a reel. He had this sleazy smile on his face. Because he was sitting so close on this couch I started to get a sick feeling in my stomach. The next thing I knew he unzipped his pants and pulled out his penis.” [THR]

I could waste this precious space on Harvey Weinstein by describing my own ordeal with him. An ordeal in a hotel room where he attempted to treat me like chattel that could be purchased with the promise of work in exchange for being his disposable orifice. But I'm not giving that man, a newly crowned figurehead of sexual abuse, the privilege of more ink. [Globe and Mail]

Laura Madden (former Weinstein Company production assistant)

At hotels in Dublin and Ireland, starting in 1991:

Laura Madden, a former employee who said Mr. Weinstein prodded her for massages … said he had a way of making anyone who objected feel like an outlier. “It was so manipulative,” she said in an interview. “You constantly question yourself — am I the one who is the problem?” [NYT]

Malthe said Weinstein barged into the room, took off his pants and sat on her bed. “He said that he could give me a part in an upcoming film, with the implication being that I had to sleep with him in order to get it,” she said.

Malthe said that after she told him she was not interested, Weinstein pushed her back and forced her to have sexual intercourse with him. “I laid still and closed my eyes and just wanted it to end,” she said. “I was like a dead person. Afterwards I lay there in complete disgust. After he was done he put his pants back on and hurriedly left the room.” [LA Times]

I, too, went to the meeting thinking that perhaps my entire life was about to change for the better. I, too, was asked to meet him in a hotel bar. I, too, met a young, female assistant there who said the meeting had been moved upstairs to his suite because he was a very busy man. I, too, felt my guard go up but was calmed by the presence of another woman my age beside me. I, too, felt terror in the pit of my stomach when that young woman left the room and I was suddenly alone with him. I, too, was asked if I wanted a massage, champagne, strawberries. I, too, sat in that chair paralyzed by mounting fear when he suggested we shower together. What could I do? How not to offend this man, this gatekeeper, who could anoint or destroy me?

It was clear that there was only one direction he wanted this encounter to go in, and that was sex or some version of an erotic exchange. I was able to gather myself together—a bundle of firing nerves, hands trembling, voice lost in my throat—and leave the room. [Atlantic]

When she got up to go, expecting a handshake, Masse said Weinstein instead grabbed her and “gave me this really tight, close hug that lasted for quite a long period of time. He was still in his underwear. Then he told me he loved me. I left right after that.” Masse said she left feeling uncomfortable, but since it was her first time meeting someone so powerful in the industry, she didn’t know how executives in the entertainment business typically conducted themselves. “I thought, ‘Gosh, maybe this is just how they treat everyone… Maybe it’s just that Hollywood schmooze thing.’ But I just didn’t feel right about it.” [Variety]

Ashley Matthau (dancer)

At Weinstein’s hotel room in Puerto Rico in 2004:

She said they went to his hotel room, where talk quickly became sexual: Mr. Weinstein told her that he had helped launch the careers of high-profile actresses who had slept with him, and that she should consider doing the same. When she declined, Mr. Weinstein pushed her onto the bed and fondled her breasts, she said. He then stripped, straddled her and masturbated on top of her.

“I kept telling him, ‘Stop, I’m engaged,’ but he kept saying: ‘It’s just a little cuddling. It’s not a problem. It’s not like we’re having sex.’” [NYT]

In 1997, Mr. Weinstein reached a previously undisclosed settlement with Rose McGowan, then a 23-year-old-actress. … The $100,000 settlement was “not to be construed as an admission” by Mr. Weinstein, but intended to “avoid litigation and buy peace,” according to the legal document, which was reviewed by The Times. [NYT]

“I might have told Mr W mid-script ‘meeting’ after he sent his assistant out that I’d punch him if he didn’t take his hands off me,” she wrote.

“Shook all the way home but high-fived myself for knowing my self worth in my early 20s.

“I knew my first film would be my last after that and I was more than OK about it.” [Variety]

Katya Mtsitouridze (Russian TV hostess)

At a hotel room in Venice in 2004:

Knowing that many movie companies and press people stayed at the hotel, she chose a public placed for the meeting. When she turned up the next day she was greeted by an assistant who said Weinstein was feeling unwell and suggested she join him for lunch in his room upstairs.

"The assistant said that he would be joining us, so I went up," Katya says. But when she walked into the room she noticed the "table was set for two" and that the "assistant instantly disappeared."

The shock of what happened next is still with Mtsitouridze 13 years later: "I was frozen into immobility like a statue, because a well-known producer with whom I've come to discuss modern Russian writers, was in a bathrobe."

What is now a familiar approach unfolded, echoed in the testimonies of dozens of women recently. Weinstein looked at Mtsitouridze and told her: "I waited for the masseuse, but she's late, we can have fun without her… let's relax." [THR]

Emily Nestor (former front-desk assistant at the Weinstein Company)

At the Peninsula Beverly Hills hotel:

“He said, ‘You know, we could have a lot of fun,’ ” Nestor recalled. “I could put you in my London office, and you could work there and you could be my girlfriend.” She declined. He asked to hold her hand; she said no. In Nestor’s account of the exchange, Weinstein said, “Oh, the girls always say no. You know, ‘No, no.’ And then they have a beer or two and then they’re throwing themselves at me.” In a tone that Nestor described as “very weirdly proud,” Weinstein added “that he’d never had to do anything like Bill Cosby.” She assumed that he meant he’d never drugged a woman. “It’s just a bizarre thing to be so proud of,” she said. “That you’ve never had to resort to doing that. It was just so far removed from reality and normal rules of consent.” [New Yorker]

As I add my name to the rapidly expanding list of women whom Harvey Weinstein has harassed, I feel a strong wish to clarify just how well-known Harvey’s actions were in our community throughout his reign as one of the most powerful players in the industry. I worked on the Harvey Weinstein-produced “The Great Raid,” where I warned a young co-star not to take Harvey up on his invitations to drinks unless the whole group was there. I had no issues on the film, nor when I met Harvey at social events around the world.

It was therefore a real shock when Harvey proceeded to put his hand on my thigh at dinner during the opening night of “Great Raid,” at which both my boyfriend and my brother were present. I grabbed his hand and squeezed it violently to hurt him and proceeded to hold it in place on his own thigh. I steered clear of him as soon as I could for the rest of the evening but soon forgot about it, until the New York Times and New Yorker pieces set off a landslide. [Variety]

Kadian Noble alleges that Weinstein invited her to his room at the Le Majestic Hotel in Cannes in February 2014, on the pretense of casting her in a movie. Once there, she alleges that Weinstein started massaging her and then groped her breasts and buttocks. According to the suit, Weinstein then trapped her in the bathroom and forced her to masturbate him until he ejaculated on the floor.

During the act, Weinstein allegedly told her, “everything will be taken care of for you if you relax.” [Variety]

Harvey led me into a bedroom — his bedroom — and announced that he wanted to give me a massage. I thought he was joking at first. He was not. For the first time since I met him, I felt unsafe. I panicked a little and thought quickly to offer to give him one instead: It would allow me to be in control physically, to know exactly where his hands were at all times. [NY Times]

On a trip to Los Angeles, she received a schedule from her agents for the hotel meeting with Mr. Weinstein.

There was no reason to suspect anything untoward, because “it’s on the fax, it’s from C.A.A.,” she said, referring to Creative Artists Agency, which represented her.

When Mr. Weinstein tried to massage her and invited her into the bedroom, she immediately left, she said, and remembers feeling stunned as she drove away. “I thought you were my Uncle Harvey,” she recalled thinking, explaining that she had seen him as a mentor. [NYT]

Samantha Panagrosso (model)

At the Cannes Film Festival in 2003:

She says she later refused a dinner invitation but Weinstein came into her cabin. “He pushed me on the bed, tried groping me and I tried to play it off because I thought he’s not going to do anything because my friends are on the boat. But it got very frustrating to get him out. It was like bargaining. When I said ‘no’ he said ‘maybe if I can’t massage you, will you massage me?’ When I said no to that he said ‘come on why are you being so difficult, all the [other] women are ok with it. I don’t see what you are making such a fuss about. Let me see your breasts at least.’” [Variety]

Juliana De Paula (model)

At Weinstein’s SoHo loft in 2007:

Once Weinstein, De Paula and three models were inside the elevator, he began fondling the women’s breasts and making them kiss each other, De Paula said. “Forcing. Like putting both heads together,” she said.

She said the women tried to resist, but were “embarrassed” and unsure of how to fend him off. The elevator opened inside Weinstein’s residence, and he began disrobing. “My [alarm] bells rang,” she said. “It was, oh my gosh, this is not going to be fun at all.”

De Paula said that Weinstein ushered the three models into his bedroom, but she ran into the adjoining bathroom. She heard at least one woman yell “stop” multiple times, but didn’t have a clear view of the bedroom. [LAT]

Zelda Perkins (former London assistant at the Weinstein Company)

At various hotel rooms in 1998:

According to former colleagues, she and several co-workers had been regularly subjected to inappropriate requests or comments in hotel rooms, and she was particularly concerned about the treatment of another woman in the office. She told Mr. Weinstein that he had to stop, according to the former colleagues, and that she would go public or initiate legal action unless he changed his behavior. [NYT]

Vu Thu Phuong (actress and model)

In Vietnam in 2010:

“Everything suddenly turned dark when I saw Mr. Harvey Weinstein standing before me with only a towel around his waist, smiling.”

He asked her if she was ready to star in a few sex scenes because there would be some in the new movie.

“I can teach you, don’t worry. Many stars have also been through this,” Weinstein reassured Phuong, according to her post. “Just treat this as necessary experiences so that you’ll have a stronger foundation in the future.” [Saigoneer]

When I got there, Mr. Weinstein wasted no time. He told me, in front of the publicist and a co-worker beside him, that a famous star, a few years my senior, had once sat across from him in the chair I was in now. Because of his “very close relationship” with this actress, she had gone on to play leading roles and win awards. If he and I had that kind of “close relationship,” I could have a similar career. “That’s how it works,” I remember him telling me. The implication wasn’t subtle. [NYT]

He came back naked in front of me (a horrible view) with a body cream in his hand, kindly asking for a massage. I softly refused, at the beginning it was calm, he kept telling me please please I do not want to have sex, I just want to relax with a massage ... I'm terrified I kept saying no, I can’t do it until I felt an arm pulling me toward the bedroom !!! [Libero Quotidiano]

Tomi-Ann Roberts (former actress, now a psychology professor)

In a New York City hotel room in 1984:

When she arrived, he was nude in the bathtub, she recalled. He told her that she would give a much better audition if she were comfortable “getting naked in front of him,” too, because the character she might play would have a topless scene.

If she could not bare her breasts in private, she would not be able to do it on film, Ms. Roberts recalled Mr. Weinstein saying. … Ms. Roberts remembers apologizing on the way out, telling Mr. Weinstein that she was too prudish to go along. [NYT]

Lisa Rose (former Miramax employee)

At the London Savoy hotel in the late 1980s:

I was sent to the hotel in a taxi. They just said, "you'll work out of the Savoy today". Everyone was so busy, so I just went and did it - I was answering the phone and ordering things, it all felt very normal.

I was alone in the room with him.

He asked me for a back rub, to give him a massage. But I had been forewarned - and I said no. Because of the warning I could really focus on getting out of the situation.

He huffed and puffed and said, "well other people do it".

I moved into a suite room immediately - I could see where the door was from there.

I was really frightened, my heart was beating, and I was thinking, "this is what it's like having so much power - he's a man who's got a lot of power".

He didn't touch me. He said nasty things but he didn't touch me. [BBC]

He wasn't being outright violent with me, he wasn't holding me down, he was just making a move and I didn't want it. So he settled for - how about you just give me a massage ... And that seemed the least offensive way for me to get out of the room. So I literally massaged his shoulders in order to get out.

And I left feeling very disgusted and confused, but I felt so implicit in this happening. [CBC]

“Come here, come on, cut it out, what are you doing, come here,” she remembered him saying. She tried to be assertive. “This is not happening,” she told him. “You’ve got to go. You have to leave. Get out of my apartment.”

Then Weinstein grabbed her, she said. “He shoved me onto the bed, and he got on top of me.” Sciorra struggled. “I kicked and I yelled,” she said, but Weinstein locked her arms over her head with one hand and forced sexual intercourse on her. “When he was done, he ejaculated on my leg, and on my nightgown.” It was a family heirloom, handed down from relatives in Italy and embroidered in white cotton. “He said, ‘I have impeccable timing,’ and then he said, ‘This is for you.’” Sciorra paused. “And then he attempted to perform oral sex on me. And I struggled, but I had very little strength left in me.” Sciorra said that her body started to shake violently. “I think, in a way, that’s what made him leave, because it looked like I was having a seizure or something.” [New Yorker, 10/27]

I was called by another assistant of his asking me to go to his hotel room. It’s like the Ashley Judd situation. He wanted to discuss the script. I was like, “I really don’t feel comfortable with this. Can we meet on the set tomorrow? In my trailer?” ... I was told, “It’s not going to be a long meeting.”

...I went to his room. Immediately he had drinks. The script was on the kitchen counter. He was in his robe. He’s like, “Would you give me a massage?” The whole thing. I said, “Harvey, I’m here to discuss the script. I’m not going to give you a massage or any of that.”

... He said, “Well, you’re not going to leave until you kiss me.” I remember that’s when it turned from “Oh, ha ha, I can handle this guy” to “Well, OK, he’s blocking the door” ... He literally would not let me leave. I said fine and kissed him on the lips. He sort of held my head and made me kiss him, and then he’s like, “OK, you can go now. That’s all I wanted. Just do what I say and you can get your way.” [Huffington Post]

He invited me to come to his hotel room for a drink. We went up together. It was hard to say no because he’s so powerful. All the girls are scared of him. Soon, his assistant left and it was just the two of us. That’s the moment where he started losing control.

We were talking on the sofa when he suddenly jumped on me and tried to kiss me. I had to defend myself. He’s big and fat, so I had to be forceful to resist him. I left his room, thoroughly disgusted. I wasn’t afraid of him, though. Because I knew what kind of man he was all along. [Guardian]

Lauren Sivan (reporter)

At New York City’s Cipriani club in 2007:

Once they left, Sivan says Weinstein leaned in and tried to kiss her. Sivan rejected that attempt and told him she had a long-term boyfriend. Weinstein then said to Sivan, “Well, can you just stand there and shut up.”

At this point, Weinstein and Sivan were in a vestibule between the kitchen and bathrooms. The only way for Sivan to get away from Weinstein required her to get past him and go through the kitchen. Sivan says she was trapped by Weinstein’s body and was intimidated.

Weinstein then proceeded to expose himself to Sivan and began to masturbate ... Sivan says Weinstein ejaculated quickly into a potted plant that was in the vestibule and then proceeded to zip up his pants and they walked back into the kitchen. [Huffington Post]

In his suite, she said, he asked her for a massage. She tried to laugh it off, saying, “I’m not very good at massages.” She said he then began masturbating in front of her. (Skidmore’s mother confirmed that her daughter told her about the incident at the time; Geiss made an almost identical claim). And after he finished, while Skidmore sat in shock, Weinstein told her nonchalantly that he’d like her to write a pilot for him. [Washington Post]

... she found herself in a hotel room with Weinstein, who produced the movie she was there to promote, “Mighty Aphrodite,” for which she later won an Academy Award. “He started massaging my shoulders, which made me very uncomfortable, and then tried to get more physical, sort of chasing me around,” she recalled. She scrambled for ways to ward him off, telling him it was against her religion to date married men. (At the time, Weinstein was married to Eve Chilton, a former assistant.) Then she left the room. [New Yorker]

That night I was offered the role, and I went out to a premiere after party that Harvey Weinstein was also at. He motioned for me to come over to him, and then grabbed me to sit me on his lap. I was so surprised and shocked I couldn’t stop laughing because it was so awkward. But then I could feel that he had an erection. I got quiet, but got off his lap quickly. He then asked me to come outside with him and other things I don’t want to share, but it was implied that if I did not comply with doing what he asked me to do that I would not get the role that I had already been informally offered. [Variety]

Paula Wachowiak (former production assistant)

At a Buffalo hotel in 1980:

One day, the auditor asked her to take a bunch of checks in a manila folder to Weinstein's hotel room to get them signed.

"When I got to Weinstein’s room he let me in but he was behind the door when it opened," Wachowiak wrote. "When I got into the room I realized that he was holding a hand towel around his waist."

She could tell Weinstein was naked underneath the small towel that was barely covering him, Wachowiak said in both the email and the interview.

Nervous about appearing unsophisticated, Wachowiak tried to keep her cool. She told herself: "Relax, these are movie people, they think nothing of walking around naked. Just keep your eyes on his face and don’t look down. And for God sake don’t let on that you want to run out of the room screaming.”

Wachowiak said Weinstein took the folder and dropped the towel. He was naked. She said she kept her eyes on his face. [Buffalo News]

Wende Walsh (former waitress)

In Buffalo, New York in 1979 or 1980:

The night Weinstein came into the bar, Walsh said, she waited on him. He stayed until closing time – 4 a.m. – and then started begging her for a ride to his car, Walsh said.

Walsh usually parked on Forest Avenue, around the corner from the bar, and she said Weinstein followed her and continued to plead with her to give him a ride.

"He got in the car," Walsh said. "He exposed himself. He was trying to push my head into his lap.... I was mortified. It was 4 a.m. and people were going to their cars."

Walsh said she told him "no" repeatedly, but she said he persisted.

"He was a guy who wouldn't take no for answer," she said.

Weinstein forced her to perform oral sex, Walsh said. She can't remember if he got out of the car or she drove him somewhere. She just remembered wanting him to go away. [Buffalo News]

Paula Williams (former model)

At Weinstein’s Hollywood home in 1989:

I walk in and it’s just Harvey. He immediately starts massaging my neck. I heard him open a bottle of champagne. I don’t think I even had a sip, and he exposed himself. [ABC News]

I personally experienced him pulling his you-know-what out of his pants in order to shock me. My basic response was, ‘You know, Harvey, I don’t really think you should be pulling that thing out, it’s not very pretty,” and then leaving, and then never having another meeting with that guy again, because it was like, ‘What on earth?' [Dudley and Bob with Matt Show]

There is also data that suggests Jones simply got much more of his base out to the polls than Moore did. Jones got about 92 percent of the raw vote total that Hillary Clinton did in 2016 in Alabama’s general election, while Moore got about 49 percent of the raw vote total that Donald Trump did in the state.

And this happened despite concerns about voter suppression efforts due to Alabama’s strict voter ID law and voting restrictions for people with felony records, both of which disproportionately impact black voters.

It’s too early to say decisively how Jones pulled this off over Moore. For example, did depressed white turnout play the defining role, or was it increased black turnout? Exit polls are simply not reliable enough to make these kinds of sweeping judgments. With more and better data, statisticians and researchers will wonk this out over the next few days, weeks, and months.

But one thing we do know for certain is that unique aspects of Jones and Moore as candidates, as well as the national political climate, made an outcome in which Jones triumphs with black voters fairly likely all along.

Moore’s slavery-friendly remarks resurfaced in the last few days

Black voters have, in general, heavily favored Democrats for decades now. But Moore was also a uniquely bad candidate for black voters.

For one, Moore was mired by bizarre comments over the last few days of the campaign in which he seemed to endorse or at least tolerate slavery.

First, comments resurfaced in which Moore appeared to say that the US should be more like it was during slavery. Asked by a black man at a September campaign rally what Trump means when he says “make America great again,” Moore at first acknowledged the US’s history of racial tensions. Then he said, “I think it was great at the time when families were united — even though we had slavery. They cared for one another. People were strong in the families. Our families were strong. Our country had a direction.” He later added that he was focused on culture, not policy, in his remarks.

Then Andrew Kaczynski at CNN uncovered 2011 remarks in which Moore responded positively to a radio host’s comment that all constitutional amendments after the 10th should be abolished. Moore said, “That would eliminate many problems. You know, people don’t understand how some of these amendments have completely tried to wreck the form of government that our forefathers intended.”

Among those amendments: the 13th abolished slavery, the 14th guarantees equal protection under the law (and was central to US Supreme Court cases that supported racial integration in public education and ended states’ bans on interracial marriage), the 15th protects black voting rights, and the 19th gave women the right to vote.

So you had two newly resurfaced comments that could be interpreted, at least in part, as fondly recalling the days of slavery.

Moore’s campaign of course strenuously denied this, telling me at one point that such an interpretation of his comments was “recklessly malicious.”

But when your candidate’s comments can be interpreted as anything remotely close to pro-slavery or slavery-tolerant, you have a big problem on your hands.

That’s especially true since Moore already had a history of racially insensitive and bigoted remarks, previously invoking the racist birther conspiracy theory by questioning if President Barack Obama was born in the US and comparing the US Supreme Court decision legalizing same-sex marriage to the 1857 decision that effectively denied black people citizenship.

Combined, this gave black voters a very clear choice: On one hand, you have a guy who seems okay with slavery. On the other hand, you have a guy who prosecuted the KKK.

The national political climate probably helped Jones too

The broader context here matters as well. While the Senate campaign went on, we were in the middle of a national political climate that has taken a frighteningly racist turn.

President Donald Trump himself has a long history of racist remarks. He launched his modern political career by promoting the racist birther conspiracy theory — an idea that he is still reportedly promoting in private. As a candidate for president, Trump also made all sorts of racist comments — suggesting that Mexican immigrants are criminals and rapists, proposing a ban on all Muslims entering the US, saying a US judge should recuse himself from a case simply because of his Mexican heritage, and deploying dog whistles about “law and order.”

All of this boiled over in August, when white nationalists, neo-Nazis, and KKK members descended on Charlottesville, Virginia, to protest the city taking down Confederate statutes. The protests quickly turned violent as the white supremacists faced off with counterprotesters who showed up to demonstrate against racism. That day, a Nazi sympathizer rammed his car into a crowd of counterprotesters — injuring dozens and killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer.

Trump’s response to all of this? He blamed both sides. “I think there is blame … on both sides,” he told reporters days after the protests. “I have no doubt about it. You don’t have a doubt about it either. If you reported it accurately, you would say that.”

As the head of the Republican Party, Trump was morally equivocating between literal white supremacists and anti-racism protesters.

This is the broader context in which Jones won and Moore lost. On top of Jones’s and Moore’s own unique qualities, the Republican Party as a whole has, due to Trump, been tied to outright racism. It is no wonder black voters would turn out against Moore and for Jones in this political climate.

Couple that motivation for higher black turnout with the allegations against Moore that he sexually abused teenagers, which almost certainly depressed turnout among Republicans in Alabama while pushing Democrats to get out to vote.

That’s how you get a situation in which the newest of two senators representing one of the most conservative states in the country will be a Democrat.

Smith also said she will run for Franken’s Senate seat during the next year’s special election, bucking expectations that she would serve as a placeholder candidate and sit out the 2018 race.

“I accept this appointment and it will be my great honor to serve Minnesota as US senator,” Smith said. “Though I never anticipated this moment, I will do everything I can to move Minnesota forward.”

Smith has a number of attributes that make her a good prospect for Democrats. She’s a woman and a high-profile and active member of Dayton’s administration. Serving as lieutenant governor was Smith’s first turn in elected office, but she’s a longtime political operative in Minnesota — she became Dayton’s lieutenant governor after serving as his chief of staff for years.

Dayton and Smith have been colleagues for many years, which Dayton said made his choice for Franken’s replacement easier.

“She’s extremely intelligent, quick to learn and is always open to other’s views,” Dayton said. “She will be a senator that all Minnesotans can be proud of.”

As Franken resigned after allegations of sexual harassment from eight women, there was a lot of speculation that Dayton would be pressured to find a woman to fill his spot. As the governor’s Wednesday press conference continued, one reporter asked Dayton whether he felt uneasy being in the position of being a “kingmaker.”

Dayton paused.

“Well … queenmaker,” he said.

Smith confirmed she will run in 2018

Smith confirmed an important detail during Wednesday’s announcement: She will run during the 2018 special Senate election to replace Franken.

“I will run in that election, and I will do my best to earn Minnesotans’ support,” she said.

Besides Smith, there are other names floating as potential Democratic candidates for the Senate seat in 2018. These include current Democratic Reps. Tim Walz and Keith Ellison of Minnesota, neither of whom have said publicly whether they will run. They’d now have to face Smith, the sitting senator, in a primary.

Walz is one of the leading Democratic candidates for governor. Meanwhile, Ellison is a high-profile progressive politician who currently serves as vice chair of the Democratic National Committee.

An Ellison aide said that the Congress member is considering a 2018 run for Franken’s seat. Meanwhile, Politico reported last week that the National Nurses United union was pressuring Dayton to name Ellison as Franken’s replacement.

During today’s press conference, Dayton said he had spoken with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), who had advised him to choose someone who could run in 2018.

“Tina’s decision to run for the seat next year is her decision,” Dayton added.

Even before Franken’s resignation, 2018 was going to be a contentious year for Minnesota Democrats, according to Democratic Farmer Labor Party Chair Ken Martin.

“Absent the news today, Minnesota was already in the crosshairs,” Martin said in an interview. “Minnesota was already at the epicenter of the national political landscape, and now you throw on a nationally competitive Senate race.”

Franken wasn’t up for reelection until 2020, but now there may be an open race for his seat (which he won by just over 300 votes in 2008). Franken’s Democratic colleague from Minnesota, Sen. Amy Klobuchar, is up for reelection as well. And with Dayton’s term ending and no immediate successor lined up, Republicans are sure to challenge all Democrats for all three positions.

“This presents a major opportunity for Republicans in Minnesota,” GOP operative Brian McClung told Politico. “Republicans here are going to be energized by the chance to replace Al Franken.”

Martin called Franken a friend and said his loss will be felt in Minnesota and in the national political landscape. At the same time, he said he cannot excuse the allegations against Franken and believed the senator resigning was the right action to take.

“I feel absolutely terrible about losing Al Franken in the Senate,” Martin said. “That in no way excuses his behavior to the women that came forward. We believe Sen. Franken made the right decision.”

“It would've been difficult to find anyone more qualified for this job,” he said.

For weeks, conservatives in and out of government have aimed to discredit special counsel Robert Mueller and his investigation into whether or not the Trump campaign colluded with Russia to win the 2016 presidential election. That criticism could potentially pave the way for Trump to demand Mueller’s ouster.

But on Wednesday, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein backed the Mueller probe in an exchange with the House Judiciary Committee’s Ranking Member Jerry Nadler (D-NY) during an oversight hearing.

“If you were ordered today to fire Mr. Mueller, what would you do?” Nadler asked. “I would follow regulation,” Rosenstein replied. “If there were good cause, I would act. If there were no good cause, I would not.”

And when Nadler pushed further, asking if Rosenstein had seen any cause to terminate Mueller, Rosenstein said he had not.

Here’s why that’s important: Rosenstein appointed Mueller as the special counsel in May, and he’s the only one with the authority to fire him. If Trump asked Rosenstein to remove Mueller, Rosenstein could decline to do so. That could potentially lead to a situation where Trump could then fire Rosenstein and replace him with someone who would do Trump’s bidding.

But Rosenstein also told lawmakers during Wednesday’s hearing that no one so far has asked Rosenstein to fire Mueller. And Rosenstein even went so far as to defend Mueller himself, saying, “It would've been difficult to find anyone more qualified for this job.”

Some conservatives want Mueller gone

Rosenstein’s defense won’t make Mueller’s critics happy. There’s a growing conservative effort to remove Mueller, which makes Rosenstein’s comments all the more noteworthy.

“I think the president should’ve fired Mueller long ago,” Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL), one of the leading voices in the push to discredit Mueller, told me in an interview.

Gaetz and his cohort point to perceived corruption and bias in the Mueller probe, including recent texts where a top FBI official who was once part of Mueller’s staff called Trump an “idiot.” They fear the investigation is actually aimed at removing Trump instead of dispassionately gathering facts.

But the timing of the anti-Mueller push is not coincidental. It comes as the special counsel appears to be closing in on Trump’s inner circle. Mueller has already charged four people — two of whom pleaded guilty, including former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn. Multiple reports suggest Trump’s son-in-law and top adviser Jared Kushner could be the next target. Plus, it appears Mueller is building a case that Trump himself may have obstructed justice.

So Rosenstein’s defense comes at an opportune time for Mueller — but it’s doubtful it will satisfy Mueller’s most vocal critics.

How local Alabama activists and the Democratic Party joined forces to elect Doug Jones.

For the past four months, Birmingham City Councilor Sheila Tyson and other local activists were going door to door in Alabama, encouraging people to vote in Tuesday’s special election for Senate.

Speaking by phone Tuesday, Tyson said she had feared the grassroots push to get out black votes wouldn’t work. She had assumed some people would forget, or just stay home. But then, she saw the long lines forming at polling places around her city and car after car pulling up to go vote.

“I’m not worried anymore,” Tyson said. “The lines have been long, the parking lots jam-packed. These African-American communities are turning up, and they are turning out.”

Alabama’s black voters have been credited with delivering a historic win to Doug Jones, the first Democrat to win a Senate seat in deeply red Alabama in the past 25 years.

Exit polls estimated black voters made up about 30 percent of the overall state turnout Tuesday night, edging higher than their participation in either the 2008 or 2012 presidential elections, when Barack Obama was on the ballot. Black voters went overwhelmingly for Jones, while far fewer white Trump voters appear to have turned out for Moore.

“If Jones prevails, as looks increasingly likely, a major reason would be that the black share of Alabama vote is way up vs. past elections,” elections analyst Dave Wasserman tweeted on Election Night.

Those on the ground said that polarized politics in the age of Trump are energizing Democratic voters in Alabama in a way they haven’t been energized in years.

“It’s almost like Trump has shaken the life back into us,” said Catrena Norris Carter, the founder and president of Women of Will, an organization encouraging female leaders to run for office in Alabama.

Facing a Republican candidate like Moore was extra incentive. Even before Moore was embroiled in a sexual misconduct scandal, he was known for his fundamentalist and far-right Christian views on same-sex marriage and abortion — as well as his opposition to Muslims serving in government and his belief that portions of the country are already under Sharia law. Moore also drew criticism for talking about America’s history of racial tension, and saying he thought the country was “strong” and “united” in past centuries, “even though we had slavery.”

Tyson knocked on doors in both white and black communities around the state as part of the get out the vote efforts. She said that while many of the white voters she talked to were more inclined to vote for Moore, Alabama’s black voters were having none of it.

“When we go to the black area it’s totally different,” she said. “They’re letting him have it. The last month, people have gone slap crazy about going to vote. They are just energized.”

“Vote or Die”

Tuesday night’s win was a product of months of organizing and planning. It was the result of an effort between local grassroots activists, the national Democratic Party, and outside progressive groups.

The Alabama senate race dominated the national headlines, but organizers said black voters they spoke to were just as energized about local issues including an oppressively low state minimum wage, increasingly segregated schools, and rural hospitals closing in majority-black areas.

Carter was one of the organizers of a state get out the vote campaign called “Vote or Die” targeting voters in Alabama’s so-called “Black Belt,” which stretches across the middle of the state.

“It’s not extreme, it’s what is going to happen,” Carter said of the campaign’s slogan.

“It literally is the death of a lot of issues that affect us directly,” she added. “If we don’t vote, if we do allow (in) a Republican, specifically an extremist like Roy Moore, it's the death of health care, it’s the death of women’s rights.”

Carter, Tyson and others went door to door in cities and rural areas alike, including impoverished places where voters didn’t have television or internet, to tell them in person how to get to the polls. They said they encountered voters who weren’t even aware the election was being held on Tuesday.

“If you’re aware of the state of poor, rural black and brown folk, they are so concentrated on their next meal and keeping the lights on,” Carter said. “They’re not plugged into the matrix of it all because they are focused on their day to day struggle.”

For once, the national Democratic Party was an active presence in Alabama

For the first time in years, local organizers had an ally in the national Democratic Party, usually absent in past Alabama elections. The Democratic National Committee and its other fundraising arms normally largely sit out elections in deeply Southern states like Alabama that are dominated by Republicans.

“We usually get nothing,” Carter said. “Unfortunately, they have deemed all of us red states. Even with Obama, even with Hillary, there were very few resources that were sent down. When they’re on the campaign trails, they don’t stop in Alabama.”

But when Moore’s campaign became marred by allegations of child molestation and accusations that he pursued sexual relationships with young teenage girls when he was in his 30s, the Democratic Party jumped at the chance to help Jones flip the Senate seat.

The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee jumped into action, helping to mobilize field teams on the ground in recent weeks.

Even as Moore dominated the national headlines, increased campaign contributions from Democrats, Super PACs, and small donors alike helped Jones blanket the airwaves with campaign ads up to Election Day. In fact, Jones raised $11.5 million in individual contributions since May — more than double the $5.2 million raised by Moore, according to federal campaign finance data. Of that, $3.9 million came from people in Alabama, compared to the $771,202 Moore raised.

Jones was also backed by progressive groups like MoveOn.org, Democracy for America, and the League of Conservation voters. Together, the three groups helped raised more than $600,000 for the Democratic candidate.

Tyson and Carter took notice of the attention and cash suddenly being showered on their state. And they said the Democratic Party needs to take Jones’s win as a lesson to expand their reach into traditionally conservative states.

“I think the party needs to do a better job of engaging,” Carter said. “We weren’t always red states. It could very easily flip back over, but it’s going to take work on the ground.”

Some election observers cautioned not to put too much stock in the 2017 Senate race changing the course of Alabama politics, adding that Democrats benefited heavily from running against such a flawed Republican candidate who was disavowed by many in his own party.

Alabama “is among the most solidly republican states in the country,” said George Hawley, assistant professor of political science at the University of Alabama. “I would say the Democrats actually put a real effort in this year as opposed to other years where they’re doing it to say they contested an election. I don’t think this fundamentally signals very much about the future of politics in Alabama.”

But they say it’s going to take work to build a coalition of black and white Democrats in a state deeply polarized by race, class, and, often, political party. While black voters helped Jones win, organizers said black voters aren’t enough to sustain Democratic energy into future elections.

“A significant part of the (state) Democratic Party is black, but the reality is you cannot win a state election with just black votes,” said John Zippert, the co-founder of local newspaper the Greene County Democrat and a Vote or Die organizer. “We’re not running individually any more, we’re running as a party. We want to bring Alabama into the 21st century.”

Carter was similarly optimistic about Alabama’s Democratic Party expanding after Tuesday night’s win.

“Let’s hope that this race pumps some energy back into the party and brings particularly more white Democrats back to the party.”

“Rock bottom is no impediment for a new president who can always find room for a new low.”

USA Today’s editorial board had some scathing words on President Donald Trump Tuesday: He is a “uniquely awful” figure whose “sickening behavior is corrosive to the enterprise of a shared governance based on common values and the consent of the governed.”

It is perhaps the most epic editorial Trump takedown of 2017 — and from a publication that has traditionally treaded lightly in politics.

“A president who would all but call Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand a whore is not fit to clean the toilets in the Barack Obama Presidential Library or to shine the shoes of George W. Bush,” the editorial board wrote, referring to Trump’s Tuesday morning tweet saying that the New York Democrat “would do anything” for campaign contributions.

Lightweight Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, a total flunky for Chuck Schumer and someone who would come to my office “begging” for campaign contributions not so long ago (and would do anything for them), is now in the ring fighting against Trump. Very disloyal to Bill & Crooked-USED!

The White House has attempted to downplay the heavy sexist undertones of Trump’s attack. White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders on Tuesday said that “only if your mind is in the gutter” would one have read sexual connotations into his tweet.

“The president’s words were deliberate,” USA Today wrote. “He pours the gasoline of sexist language and lights the match gleefully knowing how it will burst into flame in a country reeling from the #MeToo moment.”

Gillibrand in an interview with the Today showon Wednesday said she had the same read. “It was certainly just a sexist smear intended to silence me,” she said.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) on Tuesday slammed Trump on Twitter for his attempt to “bully” and “slut-shame” Gillibrand.

Most of USA Today’s editorials, which represent the official viewpoint of the newspaper’s editorial board, are coupled with an opposing view. The paper’s anti-Trump editorial was accompanied by one from Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel. She called the Democrats’ response to Trump’s Gillibrand tweet “laughable.”

Beyond Trump’s overt sexism, the USA Today editorial board also listed other examples of the “unique awfulness” of the Trump era. They cited his support for Alabama’s failed Republican senatorial candidate Roy Moore, who faced multiple allegations of sexual misconduct, including against teenagers; his hundreds of lies while in office; and his failure to fill dozens of government positions. They also hit his refusal to release his tax returns under the “absurd excuse” that he is under audit, and his ethics-breaking business entanglements.

Trump takes advantage of any occasion “to stir racial, religious, or ethnic strife,” the board wrote, noting his exploitation of Monday’s attempted terrorist attack in New York City to tout his anti-immigration policies and his equivocal reaction to racist violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, this summer.

And, they warned, it will only get worse. “Rock bottom is no impediment for a new president who can always find room for a new low,” they wrote.

USA Today isn’t the most obvious place to take a stand on Trump. And yet here we are.

USA Today, which is owned by the newspaper publisher Gannett, has a reputation as a middle-of-the-road national publication that you’re likely to find sitting outside your hotel room door in the morning. While it is one of the most popular newspapers in the United States, it is not known for taking major political stances.

But Trump has pushed the publication further into politics.

In September 2016, USA Today’s editorial board called Trump “unfit” for the presidency. “By all means vote, just not for Donald Trump,” they wrote. Though the board stopped short of making a full-throated endorsement of Hillary Clinton, its anti-Trump stance marked the first time in the paper’s 34-year history that its editorial board took a side in a presidential race.

USA Today has an audience of nearly 3 million people, according to statistics provided by the paper, and its readership is 57 percent men, 43 percent women.

That is potentially millions of people, many of them presumably Trump voters, who this week will be reading a historically apolitical paper say it is a “shock that only six Democratic senators are calling for our unstable president to resign,” and concluding:

The nation doesn’t seek nor expect perfect presidents, and some have certainly been deeply flawed. But a president who shows such disrespect for the truth, for ethics, for the basic duties of the job and for decency toward others fails at the very essence of what has always made America great.

To those who follow such things, this week’s internet backlash looks oddly familiar. Keaton Jones, a boy from Knoxville, Tennessee, went viral earlier this week when he tearfully protested the unkindness of school bullies in a video his mom shared online. As celebrities lined up to commiserate with him, offering him perks like a trip to the next Avengers premiere, skeptics dug a little deeper into the situation and realized Keaton’s family was kinda racist.

Keaton’s swift viral rise and subsequent fall is one we’ve seen before in the age of social media, and in the past year or so in particular. We’ve seen it so often, in fact, that there’s a name for it, one as confusing as the phenomenon itself: Milkshake Duck.

What is a Milkshake Duck?

What isn’t a Milkshake Duck might be the better question.

The concept of a Milkshake Duck was born in summer of 2016, via this particularly observant tweet from popular Twitter user Ben Ward, a.k.a. @pixelatedboat:

The whole internet loves Milkshake Duck, a lovely duck that drinks milkshakes! *5 seconds later* We regret to inform you the duck is racist

The “Milkshake Duck” tweet hung out for a while, steadily accruing hearts, but then got a big boost exactly a year after its invention, when the developer of a buzzy new game was revealed to have been a Gamergate supporter. The gaming community began to refer to the developer as a “Milkshake Duck,” and a meme was born.

Then there’s Gary from Chicago, who was an Oscar-night darling in early 2017, until the media skewered him the next day for having a criminal record.

Or perhaps you were a fan of the Tripps, the super-romantic couple who went viral this summer for their proudly body-positive comments — until a closer look at their social media dug up a number of racist and transphobic remarks.

the whole internet loves thick milkshake duck, the duck that's not afraid to admit that it loves a thick milkshake*five seconds later*: pic.twitter.com/Ft91257mXu

So a Milkshake Duck is just a problematic fave?

Sort of. The saying “your fave is problematic” is a Tumblr-born phrase that captures our loss of faith in our heroes over time, as we grow and evolve and they don’t always say or do the right things, and sometimes turn into creatures we don’t recognize.

The Milkshake Duck is more about instant virality in the age of social media, as well as the growing polarization of publicly professed ideologies. The viral component means anyone can become a public figure overnight — but it also means an increased likelihood of discovering that a new favorite has a checkered past. The phrase implies a sort of grim recognition: Everyone’s said and done stupid shit on the internet, and thus anyone could become a Milkshake Duck at any moment.

The Milkshake Duck, then, is probably more accurately 2017’s version of “this is why we can’t have nice things.” The idea has become so prominent over the last six months or so that it’s now possible to talk about preemptive Milkshake Ducking (yes, you can use it as a verb now):

The increased prominence of the “Milkshake Duck” over the past year seems to speak to our increasingly polarized culture, where moments of unity are vanishingly rare. The phrase seems perfectly attuned to a year that has been defined for many by the idea that nothing is safe, that all of your “faves” could be revealed at any moment to have a dark side that fills you with crushing disappointment.

That this very bleak idea is encapsulated in a concept as Dada-ist and ridiculous as a “Milkshake Duck” makes the whole meme a peak example of millennial humor — and thus we shouldn’t overlook the more tongue-in-cheek uses of the phrase as well. After all, part of the ironic fun of “Milkshake Duck” is that it kind of sounds like your worrywart parent who’s showing up to ruin all your fun. It’s all fun and games until someone loses an eye — or a dying bear turns vicious:

we regret to inform you that the starving bear has killed the rescued bunny

The backlash over the Keaton Jones bully video seems to have boosted the phrase up one more notch in the cultural register. But if it hasn’t been on your radar, you’re not alone —in fact, some are deliberately trying to avoid the inevitable:

Don’t expect to be able to escape the Milkshake Duck, however — the whole point of the Milkshake Duck is that it’s coming for us all. We’re only halfway through December: There’s still plenty of time left in the year to unearth 2017’s biggest Milkshake Duck yet.

This week, moviegoers will return to that magical galaxy far, far away when Star Wars: The Last Jedi hits theaters on Friday, December 15.

For Star Wars fanatics, the two-year wait between TheLast Jedi and 2015’s The Force Awakens has been excruciating. Star Wars fans’ fealty to the franchise is well-documented, and they’ve been analyzing every single second of every interview and trailer, positing theories as to what’s going to happen in director Rian Johnson’s new installment and trying to uncover the movie’s biggest mysteries.

But not all of us have the encyclopedic knowledge of Star Wars stans, and two years is plenty of time in which to forget some, or many, of the details of TheForce Awakens. So for those who haven’t been obsessively revisiting the film in preparation for The Last Jedi, here’s a crash course in what the major players were up to when we last saw them.

The First Order is preparing to strike back

Lucasfilm/Disney

Star Wars is, of course, about individual journeys, awakenings, and growing up. But those all happen in the context of a bigger galactic struggle.

In The Force Awakens, we learned that after the galactic civil war some 30 years ago — which served as the basis for the first Star Wars trilogy — the villainous First Order has risen up and wants to get rid of the democratic state currently known as the New Republic. Wary of an all-out war and not fully aware of the threat that the First Order presents, the New Republic is discreetly supporting the Resistance, led by General Leia Organa (Carrie Fisher).

In The Force Awakens, the First Order uses its Starkiller Base to wipe out Hosnian Prime, the capital of the New Republic. Now aware of the immense power of the Starkiller base, the Resistance figures out a way to destroy it and, for the moment, save themselves.

The question going into The Last Jedi isn’t whether the First Order will strike back but what the scope of its vengeance will be. The villains are smarting from defeat, but they, led by the sinister Supreme Leader Snoke (Andy Serkis), will certainly have a plan to strike back with a fury. Everyone — including the Resistance and Organa — knows that this is coming, regardless of whether they’re prepared.

Rey went around the galaxy to find Luke Skywalker

Lucasfilm/Disney

The Force Awakens presented us with two giant mysteries: the current location of Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) and the origin of new protagonist Rey (Daisy Ridley). Sensing the danger that the First Order presents, Organa is looking for her Jedi brother for some help. Thanks to a map assembled by helpful droids BB-8 and R2-D2, Rey finds him on a mountain island called Ahch-To and presents him with a lightsaber.

But from what we see in the Last Jedi trailer, this likely isn’t going to be a sunny meeting, with Skywalker telling Rey, “It’s time for the Jedi to end.”

That’s probably not the way anyone saw this meeting happening, but it’s understandable: Skywalker is still haunted by the betrayal of his apprentice and nephew Ben Solo, a.k.a. Kylo Ren (Adam Driver), the son of Leia and Han Solo (Harrison Ford). Skywalker created a Jedi Academy, trained Solo, and then saw Kylo Ren slaughter all his trainees. Consequently, seeing a future apprentice on his doorstep while dealing with the trauma Solo/Ren inflicted isn’t going to be easy for Skywalker.

With Skywalker meeting Rey, fans are hoping this will give us some insight into Rey’s parentage or origin, and why she’s such a powerful wielder of the Force. The Force Awakens ultimately didn’t tell us all that much about Rey other than that a lot of people, both good and bad, believe she’s powerful and important to the universe — but no one has told us precisely why. Skywalker, a powerful Jedi himself, might know something about her, or perhaps lead her to realize the power she wields. But odds are she’s going to have to save him from his own darkness first.

The Solo family is broken, and so is Chewie

Lucasfilm/Disney

The Force Awakens wasn’t a good chapter for the Solos.

After the end of Return of the Jedi and the galactic civil war, Han Solo and Leia Organa officially acted upon the romance brewing throughout the first Star Wars trilogy. They got married and had Ben, but unfortunately they didn’t live happily ever after.

Their son’s turn to the dark side drove a wedge between the two, with Leia leading the Resistance and Han zipping through space with his trusted wingman Chewbacca. And though The Force Awakens gave us reunions between both Leia and Han and Han and Kylo, it ended with Kylo being the absolute worst and killing his dad while Chewie watched.

Kylo, after killing Han and being bested in combat by Rey, has to report back to Snoke in Last Jedi. That in itself will give us more insight into his character and perhaps some background as to how Snoke rose to power and asserted himself as leader of the First Order.

Leia still has to be the brave face of the Resistance, but also deal with her villainous son and the loss of the love of her life. Complicating that is the question of how the franchise will deal with the death of the irreplaceable Fisher, who died around this time last year. According to interviews, Laura Dern’s character Admiral Holdo will, at least temporarily, lead the Resistance, providing our first glimpse of how Star Wars might proceed without Fisher.

The galaxy’s premier bromance returns

The couple with the most chemistry in The Force Awakens was John Boyega’s Finn, a.k.a. former Stormtrooper FN-2187, and Resistance pilot and BFF to BB-8 Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac). Finn, having a change of heart and existential crisis, saves Poe and crashes on the planet Jakku, where they’re separated. They later reunite in GIF-worthy fashion for the Resistance’s big attempt to destroy the First Order’s Starkiller.

In the middle of that fight, Finn takes on Kylo Ren and is beaten pretty badly. But his sacrifice wakes up something in Rey, who avenges her friend’s defeat.

Finn is currently healing from his injuries in the medical ward. Meanwhile, his bro-friend Poe is a hero after hitting the shot that destroyed the Starkiller. But this victory is probably short-lived, with a bigger battle on the horizon.

When it comes to whether Finn and Poe are going to take their obvious bromance to the next level (assuming Finn wakes up), Isaac himself gave a pretty positive “no” during the promotional tour for The Last Jedi. He told Collider:

What it means to me is that people can see themselves in a hero like this, in a movie like this. Which I love. Not only LGBT but Latinos ... that there's a representation out there for that.

As to actually seeing how that manifests itself in Poe, in this film, that isn't necessarily going to be a clear story point. But as an actor, and for me, I'm very open to those possibly storylines and I don't think it needs to be nailed down in any kind of traditional way.

Essentially, Isaac is happy that his character is a figure of representation for people who don’t necessarily often see themselves on the silver screen, but don’t expect to see any confirmation of those Poe-Finn fan theories in The Last Jedi.

That said, whether or not Poe and Finn find romance or Luke reveals Rey’s past or Leia mourns the love of her life while fighting the First Order, fans will want to see it for themselves. When the movie hits theaters on Friday, December 15, we’ll find out for sure what happens to all of these beloved characters — and can start speculating about their fate in Episode IX.

A brief guide to the visionary director’s earlier work, and how it helped set the stage for his entry into a galaxy far, far away.

When Rian Johnson was announced as the director of The Last Jedi, the eighth Star Wars movie, there was much rejoicing. Johnson is known for his imaginative twists on familiar genres, both in the film world and, on occasion, in the television world too — and his prior work seems to have served him well, with The Last Jedi already pulling in an avalanche of positive reviews.

The director, who will turn 44 two days after The Last Jedi opens in theaters worldwide, has only three feature film credits to his name prior to Star Wars. He graduated from the University of Southern California in 1996 and made several short films (including one called Evil Demon Golfball from Hell!!!, based on Edgar Allan Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart) before attracting attention with his feature debut, Brick,at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival.

Since then, he’s made two more features and directed several of the most highly praised episodes of Breaking Bad (including one of the series’ acclaimed final episodes, “Ozymandias”). Throughout his career, he’s consistently exhibited two special talents: putting new spins on established genres, and doing it without sacrificing attention to characters.

All of Johnson’s past work is well worth a look for new fans (and conveniently able to rent digitally or stream on Netflix). Each of his films — and one of his Breaking Bad episodes — represent building blocks in a career that is now intersecting with the biggest movie franchise of them all.

Brick (2005) was a stunning debut with a clear, exciting vision

The singular, astonishing vision and voice of Johnson’s feature debut instantly established him a writer/director to watch. Johnson wrote the screenplay in 1997, but spent six years getting it funded, and his efforts were totally worth it; the movie won the Special Jury Prize for Originality of Vision at Sundance in 2005 and launched Johnson on a path toward a big career.

Brick is a neo-noir film starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt and set in California — but in a twist, it’s on a high school campus among teenagers. Gordon-Levitt plays Brendan, a teenager who is still pining for his ex-girlfriend Emily (Emilie de Ravin) when she calls him to cryptically ask for help, and then turns up dead.

The film is modeled directly on hardboiled detective stories by authors like Dashiell Hammett and others, and it boasts many of the same plot elements — the lovelorn detective, the femme fatale, the seedy underbelly of an apparently respectable society (in this case, an affluent high school). But the real marvel is the dialogue, which also takes its cues from neo-noir; it sounds at first out of place, and then marvelously perfect, in the voices of the modern-day teenagers reeling off lines like, “No, bulls would gum it. They'd flash their dusty standards at the wide-eyes and probably find some yegg to pin, probably even the right one. But they'd trample the real tracks and scare the real players back into their holes, and if we're doing this I want the whole story. No cops, not for a bit.”

The Brothers Bloom (2008) gave Johnson the chance to work with bigger stars and new genres

Johnson’s follow-up to Brick came three years later with the higher-budget The Brothers Bloom, which he started working on after the 2005 Sundance win. The caper comedy, which stars Rachel Weisz, Adrien Brody, and Mark Ruffalo, premiered at the Toronto Film Festival in September 2008 and opened in theaters the following May, netting solid-but-mixed reviews from critics.

The Brothers Bloom is a classic conman story about a pair of brothers (Ruffalo and Brody) who, after being orphaned at a young age, are now skilled scam artists. One of them wants out of the family business; his brother convinces him to pull off one last job, with the wealthy heiress Penelope Stamp (Weisz) as their target. But the plan, as you might imagine, goes awry.

The Brothers Bloom feels like a more conventional movie than Brick, but it shares one key characteristic with its predecessor: a lively imagination that takes the conventions of a genre and uses them to tell a fresh and unexpected story.

Breaking Bad’s “Fly” (2010) showcased Johnson’s ability to work nimbly within an established world

Johnson directed three episodes of Breaking Bad throughout the show’s run: “Fly” (season three, episode 10); “Fifty-One” (season four, episode five); and “Ozymandias” (season five, episode 14). All three attracted a lot of attention — Johnson earned a Director’s Guild Award for Outstanding Directing for “Fifty-One,” and some have called “Ozymandias” the greatest episode of TV ever.

But it’s “Fly” that’s most unforgettable, even though it received mixed reviews from viewers when it first aired. Walt and Jesse spend most of the hour inside their concealed meth lab, trying to catch a fly that has gotten in, because Walt is certain it will contaminate their extra-pure meth cooking process. The episode plays out more like theater than traditional TV — the interactions between Walt and Jesse as they wait for the bug to enter their trap reveal much about the characters, despite the fact that not much is happening. And Johnson’s hand is especially visible in the episode’s visuals, which occasionally feel surreal and a bit zany; writing at the AV Club, Donna Bowman praised the director’s “unhinged images and bold juxtapositions.” Everything that made Breaking Bad great is on display in this episode, but it feels wholly different from much of the rest of the show.

Looper (2012) let Johnson helm a bigger-budget production while telling a human story

In his most recent film before The Last Jedi, Johnson took on another familiar genre: time-traveling science fiction. He mixed in some of the same neo-noir elements he used in Brick and added a dash of thriller, and the result was something exciting: a movie about a time-traveling contract killer who discovers that his target is ... himself.

Starring Gordon-Levitt, Emily Blunt, and Bruce Willis, Looper found a big audience, ultimately making $176.5 million worldwide against its $30 million budget — a bona fide hit. Critics loved it, too, praising the way it offered a thought-provoking and inventive take on familiar genres without abandoning characters for plot machinations. It earned a 93 percent “fresh” rating at Rotten Tomatoes and the admiration of many, including Lucasfilm head Kathleen Kennedy, who hired him for The Last Jedi.

Johnson’s talent for genre-bending and character development should serve him well for Star Wars

At the time of Looper’s release, Johnson spoke with the Hollywood Reporter about his approach to the film, and his comments serve as a good explanation of both how he thinks about genre and his appreciation for great characters:

Even though [Looper is] a time-travel movie, the pleasure of it doesn't come from the mass of time travel ... I very much wanted it to be a more character-based movie that is more about how these characters dealt with the situation time travel has brought about. So the biggest challenge was figuring out how to not spend the whole movie explaining the rules and figure out how to put it out there in a way that made sense on some intuitive level for the audience; then get past it and deal with the real meat of the story.

That commitment to really considering how a story’s conventions work on the audience, as well as to how his characters must operate and exist within those conventions, makes Johnson a great fit for films in the Star Wars universe, which double as intimate family dramas and action-filled tales of galactic conflict. And Lucasfilm and Disney seem to agree: In early November, ahead of The Last Jedi’s December 15 release, they announced that Johnson will oversee a new trilogy in the Star Wars universe, writing and directing the first episode.

Johnson’s trajectory from independent, small-budget filmmaker to keeper of the biggest franchise in cinema is a heady one. But it’s one that fits well with his vision and plays to his strengths. And it bodes well for the direction of the Star Wars universe, too.

The sheer scale and sustained ferocity of the reckoning with sexual harassment since the Harvey Weinstein revelations have taken almost everyone by surprise. Events have unfolded with such disorienting speed that it’s difficult to find emotional equilibrium — giddy disbelief and nameless dread alternate and sometimes mix.

It was inevitable that the wave of charges would take down some liberal heroes. When the first charges against Sen. Al Franken appeared, it set off a predictable round of anguished debate on the left. New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg has been a key figure — in the wake of the revelations, she wrote a column saying Franken should go, only to second-guess herself the following week.

On Tuesday, academic and activist Zephyr Teachout published a column of her own in the Times, questioning whether Franken has been treated with fairness and proportionality.

Franken’s offenses seem, at the very least, of a different kind than Harvey Weinstein’s, and the proper censure is far from clear. Should Franken resign? Should Democrats allow the Senate ethics investigation to proceed? How should they weigh Franken’s long service of progressive causes, including the rights of women, against his ugly and immature treatment of individual women? How can a zero-tolerance policy be reconciled with due process?

This excruciatingly difficult intra-left debate has played out on dozens of other websites and cable shows — and it’s unlikely to end anytime soon, no matter what happens to Franken.

Both wrestle with the same dilemma: While the left attempts to address this issue in good faith, the right is using it entirely as a tool to divide Democrats and win short-term political advantage. Every move Democrats make to hold their own accountable, to apply the principle without favor, is immediately used against them.

Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images for Hollywood ReporterStill waiting for the right to unite in condemning Bill O’Reilly.

Sensitive debates are difficult under a torrent of bad-faith gaslighting

Conservatives have missed no opportunity to use Franken as a wedge. While he was still in office, they used him to attack Dems. And when he resigned?

“What you saw today was a lynch mob,” Fox News contributor Newt Gingrich said Wednesday on Laura Ingraham's show. The former House speaker argued that Democrats' mind-set is, “Let's just lynch him because when we are done, we will be so pure.”

They pivoted from “Dems are bad for keeping Franken” to “Dems are bad for losing Franken” without breaking a sweat, because the point was never about Franken. The point is always the same: Dems are bad.

So now the left struggles with the dilemma of how to behave honorably under a set of rules and norms that their opponents do not acknowledge or accept.

Anger over that asymmetry is what animates Lithwick’s column. “This is a perfectly transactional moment in governance,” she writes ...

... and what we get in exchange for being good and moral right now is nothing. I’m not saying we should hit pause on #MeToo, or direct any less fury at sexual predators in their every manifestation. But we should understand that while we know that our good faith and reasonableness are virtues, we currently live in a world where it’s also a handicap.

Charles Pierce at Esquire put it more bluntly: “There is no commonly accepted Moral High Ground left to occupy anymore, and to pretend one exists is to live in a masturbatory fantasyland. It’s like lining yourself up behind Miss Manners in a political debate against Machiavelli.”

Amanda Marcotte has argued that booting Franken (and replacing him with a woman) is the smart political move regardless. But even if that’s so in Franken’s case, it surely won’t always be true that the right thing is the politically advantageous thing, especially in the face of a movement seeking to exploit every weakness.

The point is not that the left is pure on sexual harassment, or anything else. Far from it. Everyone faces the temptation to treat friends and enemies differently. But there is debate, struggle, made more difficult by the fact that there is none remaining on the right.

It is genuinely difficult to know how to respond to bad faith. Acting as though rules and norms still apply just seems to make Dems vulnerable, but abandoning them entirely doesn’t sound great either.

I don’t have an answer (maybe there isn’t one). All I can offer is a closer look at the two main tools the right uses to weaken and degrade the norms that hold American public life together. They are familiar from the sexual harassment debate, but many other debates as well.

Paul Morigi/Getty Images for DentonsGaslighter-in-chief.

Whataboutism to show that no one really cares

The first is whataboutism. Even if you haven’t heard the term, you’ll recognize it:

“Trump admitted to sexually assaulting women, and more than a dozen have accused him of it.”

“What about Bill Clinton?”

“The Trump administration is trying to bail out failing coal plants with billions of dollars, to no credible end.”

“What about Solyndra?”

“Republican legislatures in numerous red states are passing laws deliberately designed to reduce voting turnout among Democrats, especially minorities.”

“What about ACORN?”

“Roy Moore is a lunatic creep.”

“What about Al Franken?”

And so on, forever. For any violation of norms or rules, there is a “what about.”

Though it is a response to a moral accusation, it is not really a moral argument at all. Even if you believe the worst and most fevered charges against Bill Clinton, for instance, his behavior cannot justify Trump’s. Nothing Al Franken or Democrats do can justify Roy Moore. Morally, their behavior stands or falls on its own.

The point of whataboutism is not to justify anything — it’s to show that nobody really cares. Nobody really puts principle above tribe. Everyone is out for their own team, and people who pretend otherwise are liars or hypocrites.

“Don't be fooled by any of this,” Sean Hannity said on his show the night Franken resigned. “This Democratic decision today obviously was coordinated, and to turn on Franken, it's purely political.”

In other words, Democrats are faking. They don’t really care about sexual harassment. They’re just out to help their tribe.

Shared norms only exist to the extent people believe they exist. They have only the force we ascribe them. The more people believe that a norm is just a sham, tribal warfare through other means, the more they will behave accordingly. If “everybody does it,” then anybody can do it.

Delegitimizing the referees

The second key tool of tribal morality is to weaken or degrade any claim of authority that transcends tribe — to disqualify any referees with the ability to constrain tribal behavior.

The right has gone after government, journalism, science, and academia in turn, in each case doing at a social scale what whataboutism is meant to do at the individual level: show that all claims of transpartisan authority are fraudulent. The message right-wing media relentlessly delivers to the base is that these institutions are in thrall to the left, that there is only tribe versus tribe, no shared authorities or referees. (I wrote a much longer post about this earlier this year.)

This tool, interestingly, hasn’t worked very well for the right on sexual harassment. Insofar as there is any official authority to discredit, it is the mainstream media that’s breaking the stories. They certainly attack media at every opportunity, but the victims themselves are the real authorities, and there are too many of them, coming from too many directions, to discredit at once. (Though Moore’s campaign tried.)

But the tool is hard at work in other cases. Take Robert Mueller’s investigation of Trump’s ties to Russia. Mueller is, by everyone’s pre-2017 estimation, the very definition of a straight-shooter, an authority trusted on all sides. Here’s what Newt Gingrich had to say back in May:

Robert Mueller is superb choice to be special counsel. His reputation is impeccable for honesty and integrity. Media should now calm down

“Public statements and messaging documents obtained by The New York Times,” Jim Tankersley writes, “show a concerted push by Republican lawmakers to discredit a nonpartisan agency they had long praised.” The JCT was Good until it threatened the tribe; now it’s Bad.

They’ve gone after the mainstream media (“MSM”), the academy, courts, climate science, government agencies — virtually any institution assigned with establishing a shared base of facts or arbitrating factual disputes. A month ago, Trump’s administration released an incredibly detailed account of climate change and its dangers, written by federal climate scientists and researchers. The administration ignored or dismissed it. (See Ezra Klein for more on how deeply intellectual rot has penetrated the GOP.)

The point of all this is to convince a captive right-wing base that the only sources they can trust are partisan conservative sources — that the only other choices are partisan left sources. There are only tribes, no referees, no constraints.

So they can dismiss a series of Washington Post stories on Roy Moore’s creepy history as “fake news,” despite dozens of sources. Federal climate scientists, the CBO, the JCT, the MSM — it’s all fake news. Any bearer of bad news for the tribe is against the tribe and thus can’t be trusted. It’s a closed loop.

Whataboutism and rejection of transpartisan authority translate to a simple message: No one cares about anything but their own tribe, and only our tribe can be trusted.

While the left wrestles with tribalism, the right has given into it completely. And it sure looks like that puts the left at a systematic disadvantage.

Is respecting rules and norms a handicap?

When Obama was president, trying to pass the economic recovery bill and the Affordable Care Act, Republicans took to the press constantly complaining about transparency, due process, and giving lawmakers time to read legislation before they vote on it. The phrase “rammed down our throat” is used with disturbing frequency in reference to the ACA.

But since Trump took office, Congressional Republicans have hastily assembled and attempted to rush through, with virtually no hearings, analysis, or bipartisan outreach, two radical, unpopular bills in the past year.

Okay this is absurd. One page of the new #GOPTaxPlan is crossed out with an ex. Another page is just a line. Is that a crossout? Is this page part of the bill? WHY AM I ASKING THESE QUESTIONS HOURS BEFORE WE VOTE ON IT?? #GOPTaxScampic.twitter.com/57Qbi7gT5F

Their supposed procedural principles were just a tool for partisan advantage, a convenient way to bash Obama and justify total opposition.

Under Obama, Republicans used fears about the deficit as a weapon to oppose any and all spending. Now, they are trying to pass a tax bill that would increase the deficit by more than a trillion dollars, almost entirely for tax cuts on the rich (and then promising, with astonishing chutzpah, to subsequently cut Medicare and Medicaid because of the deficit). Their supposed principles on the deficit were just a tool for partisan advantage.

Under Obama, Republicans were forever crying “executive overreach” and impending tyranny. Now Trump has used his office to enrich himself, he fired Comey (by his own words) to shut down the Russia investigation, and all day long Fox is running authoritarian wish fulfillment like this:

JFC, Jeanine Pirro is calling for the purging, arrest, and prosecution of people at the FBI and DOJ. https://t.co/lCYjBpZTJz

They said they cared about “the swamp,” but they have stood by mutely as the administration packs itself with cronies, lobbyists, and amateurs. They said they cared about family values, but they elected a bullying, misogynistic swindler. They said they cared about sexual harassment, but, well ...

The Latest: Republican National Committee once again supporting Roy Moore, 3 weeks after severing ties over sexual molestation allegations. https://t.co/HYIT7Eby7E

It was all bad faith, the language of principle deployed purely for partisan advantage.

Now they are busy bashing mainstream media errorsthat were, without exception, caught and corrected by the media sources in question. The president is calling for the firing of individual journalists.

.@daveweigel of the Washington Post just admitted that his picture was a FAKE (fraud?) showing an almost empty arena last night for my speech in Pensacola when, in fact, he knew the arena was packed (as shown also on T.V.). FAKE NEWS, he should be fired.

This is Trump, who gets more things wrong before breakfast — literally — than Dave Weigel has in his entire career. According to the (ahem) Washington Post, as of November 13, Trump has made 1,628 “misleading claims” this year alone.

Trump has averaged 5.5 falsehoods per day this year. He’s been on an amazing hot streak lately, up to *9 falsehoods per day* over a month. On pace for about 2,000 in his first year in office. As far as I know, not one firing, apology or correction.https://t.co/UTI0GRMgwp

The right-wing media outlets around which conservatives increasingly huddle — Fox, Breitbart, and Facebook shares of dubious origin — swim in fantasy, paranoia, and conspiracy theories all day, fairy tales about their opponents smuggling guns, having people assassinated, and running child prostitution rings out of pizza restaurants.

They use the principle of accuracy in media as a tool for tribal advantage.

Lies on Breitbart don’t count. Lies on Hannity and Fox & Friends don’t count. Kellyanne Conway’s dissembling doesn’t count. Only the mistakes of people who care about the truth count. These are the rules of decline.

They sense that the language of principle works. They have weaponized it, using it to jam up the other side. (Over email, historian Rick Perlstein, who has chronicled this kind of thing on the right for years, compared it to a hand grenade — they catch it and toss it back.) They know that those who do take norms seriously feel obliged to assume good faith.

But then you end up with a situation in which “only the mistakes of people who care about the truth count.” Racism and sexual harassment only count against people who care about racism and sexual harassment. Carbon emissions only count against people who care about climate change. Partisanship only counts against those open to compromise.

As Goldberg wrote, “Democrats, by and large, want their politicians held accountable. Republicans, by contrast, just want Democratic politicians held accountable.”

It’s a fundamental asymmetry, shaping everything in US politics, but it’s just not clear what mainstream institutions and/or the left should do about it.

Brian Beutler has been arguing for a while that journalists are simply failing to do their job when they take demonstrably bad-faith actors like Steve Bannon or Kellyanne Conway at their word. Enabling them to deliver falsehoods to large audiences, even in the rare instances when the falsehoods are accompanied by rebuttals, does the public a disservice. Treating their contempt for journalists and factual accuracy as normal politics, just the typical spin that both parties engage in, creates the illusion balance where there is none.

“The longer it takes us to develop new norms for addressing demonstrable bad faith,” Beutler writes, “the likelier it becomes that this tide of propaganda will swamp us.”

But as I asked in my post on tribal epistemology, what would those new norms look like? If mainstream journalists assume bad faith on the part of dissemblers on the right, they’re going to lose a lot of guests, sources, and viewers. If right-wingers don’t see their conspiracy theories represented back to them in mainstream news, it will merely hasten their ongoing alienation from mainstream sources of fact and information. Their epistemic closure will only grow more closed.

Despite thousands of hours wasted and many millions of dollars spent, the Democrats have been unable to show any collusion with Russia - so now they are moving on to the false accusations and fabricated stories of women who I don’t know and/or have never met. FAKE NEWS!

In the meantime, Franken is leaving, but recent experience suggests that more women will be coming forward, implicating lawmakers on both sides of the aisle. The left, because it cares (or at least some of it cares) about sexual harassment as such, must navigate its own conflicting impulses and interests to determine what’s fair to everyone — while under a hail of bad-faith fire from those who see it as just one more way to divide and demoralize them.

Time magazine named "the Silence Breakers" its Person of the Year for 2017. These are the women and men who shared their stories of assault, harassment, and hostility and publicly named their alleged abusers. But the story goes beyond the magazine’s cover.

That elbow in the lower right-hand corner is attached to a young hospital worker from Texas, who anonymously reported her harassment for fear of the negative impact it could have on her and her family. It represents a much larger contingent than the women on the cover: the silence keepers.

The Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network (RAINN) studied the underlying reasons people don’t report, and, unsurprisingly, the above statistics are connected. According to RAINN, the No. 1 reason people don’t report their abuse and harassment is because they’re afraid of the repercussions.

Time has made it a point to recognize the courage of the “Silence Breakers,” but it’s important to remember why their actions were brave: because there are far more people remaining silent, who feel that they don’t have the option of speaking up.

To learn more about why women and men do not report harassment and assault, watch the video above and subscribe to our YouTube channel.

Vox - Front Page

We on Earth get to take in the wonder of a meteor shower typically when our planet passes through the trail of a comet. The bits of rock and debris burn up when they hit Earth’s dense atmosphere, and streak across the sky.

But the Geminid meteor show — which will reach its peak Wednesday night and early Thursday morning — is not typical.

If you go outside Wednesday night and watch, you’ll be seeing bits of debris from an asteroid named 3200 Phaethon burn up in the night sky.

The asteroid is small — just 3 miles wide — and rocky. It also behaves much more like a comet than an asteroid.

While asteroid orbits tend to be more round, 3200 Phaethon has a highly elliptical orbit like a comet. But more importantly for the meteor shower, 3200 Phaethon is a rare asteroid that forms a tail.

This is likely due to its orbit, which brings it very close to the sun (in Greek mythology, Phaethon is the son of Helios, the sun god). The heat of the sun fractures the rock and creates the trail of debris that the Earth is about to barrel through. For this reason, 3200 Phaethon is sometimes referred to as a “rock comet.”

What’s more, those asteroid bits are denser than typical meteor kindling, which means they move more slowly across the sky as they burn. They also tend to be a bit brighter than the typical meteor. “The brightest often break up into numerous luminous fragments that follow similar paths across the sky,” the Royal Observatory Greenwich explains in its guide to the night sky.

All of this makes the Geminids “the best and most reliable of the annual meteor showers,” usually producing around 120 meteors an hour at peak, NASA notes.

And Wednesday night should be especially good for viewing: The moon will be a thin, waning crescent that won’t rise until 3:30 am and will only give off off dim light that shouldn’t obscure the meteors.

The constellation Gemini — out of which the Geminids appear to radiate — will rise in the Northeast in the early evening, and then by midnight, will be nearly directly overhead in the Southwestern sky, before setting in the West around daybreak. When Gemini is nearly overhead all you have to do to spot these meteors is look up (a star-spotting app like SkyGuide is helpful for knowing exactly where to look and when where you live). You should be able to see some meteors in the early evening hours after dark, but the most meteors will be visible from midnight to 4 am, NASA explains.

“The Geminids will be the best shower this year,” Bill Cooke, a NASA meteor scientist, said in a press release.

Further reading:

Former Russia probe investigator Peter Strzok’s texts have been released and they’re stirring up controversy.

A senior FBI counterintelligence official who had until recently been part of special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation spent months sending text messages to a colleague in the run-up to the 2016 election that derided President Donald Trump as a “douche,” an “utter idiot,” and a “loathsome human.”

The release of the texts from Peter Strzok, who had led the FBI’s investigation of Hillary Clinton’s private email server before joining the Russia probe, is giving new ammunition to Mueller’s conservative critics. The Trump defenders say the texts provide clear evidence that the former FBI chief isn’t running an impartial probe — and should be removed from his post.

The texts first came to light in early December, when the New York Times reported that Mueller had ousted Strzok after learning of the anti-Trump messages. Strzok, who was removed in late July, had sent the messages to an FBI lawyer, Lisa Page.

But the specific content of those messages wasn’t known until Tuesday night, when the Justice Department took the highly unusual step of sharing them with Congress and a set of reporters, despite the fact that Strzok is still being investigated by the Justice Department’s internal watchdog.

The roughly 375 text messages show Strzok and Page sharing harsh criticisms of Trump and strong support for Clinton. The messages start in mid-2015 and continue until weeks after the election.

For example, in an exchange in March 2016, Strzok wrote, "God Hillary should win 100,000,000 - 0."

Page replied to Strzok later, “Also did you hear [Trump] make a comment about the size of his dick earlier? This man can not be president.”

The text messages have enraged Republican lawmakers and conservative pundits, who see them as evidence that Mueller’s probe has been tainted by partisan bias.

And the news comes at a convenient time for them, as it discredits Mueller’s probe just as the investigation is ramping up criminal charges against Trump’s associates.

The text messages are giving Trump’s defenders new ammo

During a House Judiciary Committee hearing on Wednesday, Republican chairman Bob Goodlatte (VA) said that the texts showed “extreme bias” against Trump, and were “deeply troubling.”

However, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, the only official in the Justice Department with the authority to fire Mueller, said during the hearing he was “not aware” of Mueller acting inappropriately and he saw no good cause to dismiss him.

But the conservative media world isn’t convinced, and it devoted a great deal of airtime to the Strzok text messages on Wednesday, especially a string of enigmatic texts in which Strzok says “I’m afraid we can’t take that risk” while apparently alluding to the prospect of Trump’s election.

A Brietbart writer said the texts point to “a potential idea to thwart Trump’s election,” and the Daily Caller wrote that the text exchanges show potential plans to “prevent Donald Trump from being elected president.” Fox News’ Martha MacCallum said the texts hint at “some sort of poison pill perhaps or something to protect the country from what they see as what’s coming.”

This only adds to the enormous controversy swirling around Strzok in conservative circles. Earlier in December CNN revealed that when he led the FBI’s investigation of Clinton's private email server, he changed how then-FBI Director James Comey publicly described her behavior from “grossly negligent” to “extremely careless” in a draft memo. That change had the effect of softening Comey’s criticism of Clinton at a particularly sensitive time in the 2016 campaign, and may have shielded her from charges of criminal conduct.

The scandal comes as the Mueller probe reaches deeper into Trump’s inner circle. The special counsel has already charged four people — two of whom pleaded guilty, including former national security adviser Michael Flynn. Multiple reports suggest Trump’s son-in-law and top adviser Jared Kushner could be the next target. Plus, it appears Mueller is building a case that Trump himself may have obstructed justice.

And that’s why the Strzok controversy is so important. Trump’s defenders are trying to build a public case for firing the special counsel — and for defending the president afterwards. If Trump decides to one day pull the trigger, expect to hear Peter Strzok’s name bandied about as one of the reasons why.

Black women voted overwhelmingly against Roy Moore. Feminism has to recognize their leadership.

To some, the results of Tuesday night’s Alabama special election might look like a victory for #MeToo.

Roy Moore, a man accused of sexually pursuing, abusing, or assaulting multiple teenage girls, was defeated by Doug Jones in an unexpected upset, sending an Alabama Democrat to the Senate for the first time in 25 years.

But the lessons of Tuesday night are more complicated than that. According to exit polls, 63 percent of white women voted for Moore — a reminder of last year’s presidential election, when 53 percent of white female voters cast their ballots for a man caught on tape talking about grabbing women “by the pussy.”

The Alabama special election demonstrated, once again, that many white women are quite willing to vote for a man accused of sexual assault, and that the idea of women as a unified voting bloc is sorely misguided. It also showed that the future of feminist politics in 2018 lies in recognizing the work of women of color, who have been leaders across feminist issues for a long time, often with little recognition from white Americans.

Sexual misconduct allegations aren’t the only reason Moore lost

Despite the accusations against him, made public at a time when women all over the country are speaking out against sexual harassment and assault, Roy Moore managed to get 41 percent of women’s votes across races. But, according to preliminary exit polls, black voters turned out in large numbers and voted overwhelmingly against him. Ninety-eight percent of black women voted for Doug Jones; 93 percent of black men did the same. As Vann R. Newkirk II put it in the Atlantic, “black voters were informed and mobilized to go vote, and did so even in the face of significant barriers.” Voter ID laws and DMV closures in the state appeared to disproportionately affect black residents, and civil rights groups and voters raised concerns about voter suppression on Election Day.

Nor did Moore necessarily lose the election because of women’s reports of sexual misconduct. Only 7 percent of voters said those reports were the single most important factor in their decision, along with 34 percent who said they were one of several important factors.

Though women’s reports of Moore’s behavior certainly should have disqualified him from public office — the man was, after all, reportedly banned from a mall for bothering teenage girls — he had shown himself to be unfit for that office long before the sexual abuse allegations came to light. As chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, he was relieved of his duties twice for failing to follow the law: once for refusing to remove a monument bearing the Ten Commandments from the state Supreme Court building and once for telling Alabama judges not to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples, in violation of the Supreme Court’s decision. He has described “homosexual conduct” as “an inherent evil against which children must be protected,” as Mark Joseph Stern notes at Slate. In a 2006 op-ed titled “Muslim Ellison should not sit in Congress,” he compared the Quran to Mein Kampf.

On the campaign trail, he continued to show voters exactly who he was. At a September campaign rally, he opined that America was great “when families were united — even though we had slavery.” Given that slave holders often separated families and sexually assaulted enslaved people, it seemed clear which families Moore was prioritizing.

Tuesday night’s vote was a victory for harassment and assault survivors, certainly. It was also a victory for anyone who cares about the civil rights of LGBTQ, Muslim, and black Americans. One of the lessons of this election is that these issues are inseparable from the fight for women’s rights and women’s safety. It’s not a new lesson, especially for LGBTQ women and women of color, but it will be important for all feminists to remember in the months ahead.

The second important lesson — also far from new — is that white women cannot necessarily be relied upon to reject candidates accused of sexual misconduct. That was clear after the election of President Donald Trump, and it’s even clearer now. That doesn’t mean it should fall on black women to “save” America from predatory men, as Vox’s P.R. Lockhart has noted.

“In a state where a disproportionate level ofAfrican Americans face rampant poverty, poor education systems, and unequal access to healthcare, the votes of black women weren’t about some altruistic mission to save America from itself,” Lockhart wrote. “Their votes were a very real attempt to make a change that would help themselves and their families.”

Tuesday night’s election was a reminder that feminism as a movement has to acknowledge the longstanding leadership of women of color on sexual assault prevention, as on a variety of issues. Tarana Burke was living in Alabama a decade ago when she decided to start the Me Too campaign to help survivors of sexual violence, she told me in October, and she is one of many women of color whose work has at times been forgotten or ignored by white feminists.

Feminism can win elections — but not if it only focuses on white women and their concerns

Today’s feminist movement cannot ignore women of color — not because women of color are needed to support causes championed by white women, but because women of color have often been the ones on the front lines, championing feminist causes when white women won’t. Black women are the ones who voted overwhelmingly to defeat Roy Moore. They also voted overwhelmingly for Hillary Clinton in 2016, with just 3 percent casting a vote for Trump.

Women of color are already leading activism on issues ranging from reproductive justice to pay equality, but they haven’t always been recognized as leaders by white feminists or mainstream feminist groups. In a recent example, Zahara Hill noted at Ebony that initial coverage of the #MeToo hashtag failed to credit Burke, and that in the social media conversation around the hashtag, “Black women were quickly isolated from the dialogue before we could familiarize ourselves with it.” Exclusions like that can’t happen if feminism is to be relevant as a political force in 2018.

One hopeful sign was the Women’s Convention in October. The Women’s March on Washington in January, first called the Million Woman March, had been criticized for using the language of black civil rights activists for an event initially conceived largely by white women. “Once again, the labors of Black folks (in this case, the 1995 Million Man March and the 1997 Million Woman March organized by Minister Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam) were being co-opted and erased by clueless White ones,” Jamilah Lemieux wrote at ColorLines in January. “And just what would this ‘million’ women be coming together to march about—their mothers, sisters, homegirls and friends who elected Trump in the first place?”

The organizers of the Women’s Convention — Tamika Mallory, Carmen Perez, Linda Sarsour, Bob Bland, and more — worked hard to highlight the work of leaders of color at the October gathering, and called on white attendees repeatedly to support people of color, rather than only demanding their support. A panel called “Confronting White Womanhood,” designed to help white women recognize their own roles in perpetuating racism, was so popular it was ultimately held twice. In a closing panel, political commentator Angela Rye advised the crowd to support black-owned businesses, put their money in black-owned banks, and donate to black-run charities.

Not all feminists are women, and not every woman identifies as a feminist, even if she supports some of the goals that feminists fight for. Still, feminism has emerged as a powerful political force in the wake of the Women’s March, convention, and the elections this November, in which Danica Roem beat the author of a discriminatory “bathroom bill” to become the first transgender woman in the Virginia House of Delegates, and Ashley Bennett won a seat on the Atlantic County Board of Chosen Freeholders, beating out a man who had made a sexist joke about Women’s Marchers cooking dinner.

The feminism that is winning elections, however, is one that encompasses more than the concerns of white women, and more than issues traditionally thought of as “women’s issues.” It’s one that includes criminal justice reform and resistance to mass incarceration, a living wage for domestic workers and protections for immigrants, LGBTQ equality and voting rights for all.

Candidates who can speak to those issues in 2018 and beyond are likely to energize a powerful base of voters of color, LGBTQ voters, and their allies. Candidates who try to preach feminism while appealing only to white voters, meanwhile, are likely to fail.

The most important policy question of the day: What does Doug Jones's underdog win Tuesday night mean for the GOP tax overhaul drive?

Officially, the answer is nothing. Party leaders believe they can draft a bill by Friday and pass it on Monday, at which point they'll still have 52 Senate votes and thus room to spare even with Bob Corker defecting.

But can they really get it done on that schedule? They've made promises to Susan Collins on health care and Jeff Flake on immigration that House Republicans seem disinclined to keep.

John McCain might develop some mavericky process objections to slamming a bill through with the vote of a lame-duck senator who the voters of Alabama rejected in a primary. Will House Republicans from California develop second thoughts about walking the plank on a SALT provision that's terrible for their constituents after watching the party lose in Alabama?

In the past few days, House Speaker Paul Ryan has thrown cold water on those bills [Matt: i.e., the ones Collins got Senate leaders to promise to pass to stabilize health insurance markets] and the White House started to back away from its commitment. House Republicans have warned that there aren’t the votes in the lower chamber to pass the bills Collins supports.

Collins has in turn started to leave herself room to oppose the final tax plan that House and Senate negotiators are working on, if her demands are not met.

This path to failure has become clear: Jones wins in Alabama on Tuesday, the tax negotiations drag on long enough for him to be seated, and Collins flips to a “no” vote because her extracted concessions on health care fall through.

For my part, I think it's noteworthy how much Jones talked about CHIP. Obviously it'd be silly to say that CHIP was the main issue in this race. But Jones did want to inject some policy substantive into his pitch, and the ground he chose to pick that fight on was CHIP — and it was an issue that succeeded at inspiring the base to come out and fight without being off-putting to crossover voters.

Just a reminder that Republicans in Washington are putting themselves out on some dangerous policy limbs.

This is an abbreviated web version of The Weeds newsletter, a limited-run policy newsletter from Vox’s Matt Yglesias. Sign up to get the full Weeds newsletter in your inbox, plus more charts, tweets, and email-only content.

Pennsylvania father Osman Enriquez was waiting for a letter telling him to reapply.

A former DACA recipient who was waiting to reapply for deportation protections, after his initial application was rejected due to postal service delays, is currently in the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Pennsylvania, Vox has exclusively learned.

Osman Enriquez, who was picked up by ICE Monday morning after a routine traffic stop, is one of the estimated 12,000 immigrants who have lost their DACA protections since the Trump administration started winding down the program in September.

Enriquez is among those immigrants. According to the Trump administration, he’s supposed to wait to be invited to reapply by US Citizenship and Immigration Services. Instead, he’s being put on the road to deportation. (DHS did not respond to a request for comment.)

Enriquez might be the first known case of an immigrant getting detained by ICE after his DACA expired under the administration’s new rules. He’s almost certainly the first known case of an immigrant getting detained while waiting to reapply for DACA renewal.

His presence there is perhaps the most vivid reminder yet that as Congress drags out what to do about DACA recipients, it will probably be too late for some.

A typical DACA recipient becomes a detainee

Osman Enriquez is a pretty typical DACA recipient. He’s a 27-year-old from Guatemala who graduated from a Lancaster, Pennsylvania, high school and now works in stonemasonry. He was convicted of a “summary offense” (a minor crime) as a juvenile, but it wasn’t enough to stop him from qualifying for, and getting, protection under DACA. His fiancée has a green card, and their son, who’s not quite a year old, was born in the United States.

When the Trump administration announced on September 5 that it would end DACA, Enriquez’s work permit was set to expire in a little over a month — on October 15. According to the administration, that made him (and 154,000 other DACA recipients whose work permits were set to expire before March 5, 2018) eligible to apply for a two-year renewal of protections — but only if they got their applications in by October 5.

Enriquez went to the Lancaster office of immigrant advocacy and legal services organization Church World Service for help with his renewal application. According to Carrie Carranza of CWS, his application was mailed September 18. “His application was mailed out at same time as many other DACA applications that have now been approved,” she told Vox on Wednesday.

But Enriquez wasn’t so lucky. His application arrived at the USCIS service center in Chicago on October 10 — three weeks after he mailed it, and five days after the deadline. It was rejected.

At the time, Carranza says, they didn’t really understand what had happened; “We told him, ‘We’re so sorry this happened; you did everything right; it was just a fluke, a debacle, out of your control.’”

It turns out the scope of the “debacle” was beyond anything she could imagine. It is likely that thousands of DACA renewal applications were mailed in advance of the deadline but were slowed down by USPS delays — including many that were received at government dropboxes on October 5 but were rejected because they were not picked up until the next day.

When reports from the New York Times and Vox highlighted the problem in November, USCIS reversed itself, declaring that immigrants whose DACA renewals had been mailed on time would be given the chance to reapply.

In guidance issued at the end of November (and included in the current FAQs about DACA on the USCIS website), the government says, “The USPS is working with USCIS to identify DACA requests that were received after the deadline due to USPS mail-service delays” — like Enriquez’s.

“As soon as USPS completes its assessment, identifies such requests, and provides this information to USCIS, USCIS will send affected DACA requestors a letter inviting them to resubmit their DACA request. If you receive such a letter, you will have 33 calendar days from the date of the letter to resubmit your request.”

The FAQ estimates that the Postal Service assessment will be done by “mid-December,” and that USCIS will send invitations to reapply about a week after that.

But in the meantime, Enriquez was in limbo. His work permit had expired, but he still had to work to support his family; his driver’s license had expired, because it was only valid as long as he had DACA, but he still needed to drive to get to work.

On Monday morning — six days before his son’s first birthday — as Enriquez drove down Route 83 to his contracting job, he was pulled over by a Pennsylvania State Police officer. The officer told him his vehicle registration had expired. Enriquez’s fiancée says the family thought they had kept their registration current; since Pennsylvania doesn’t put registration-date stickers on license plates, Carranza speculates that the only way the trooper would have known Enriquez’s registration had lapsed would be if she’d run his license plates when he drove by.

Enriquez was ultimately issued a ticket not for the expired registration, but for his expired driver’s license. But in the meantime, Carranza says, the state police officer had called Immigration and Customs Enforcement to come pick up Enriquez. ICE agents took him to the York detention center and served him with a notice to appear in immigration court — formally starting deportation proceedings against him.

Two days later, Enriquez is still in detention. Unless something changes, he’ll miss his son’s birthday on Saturday.

The Trump administration made this inevitable, and only Congress can stop it from getting worse

Advocates and Democrats, extrapolating from USCIS numbers, have estimated that 122 immigrants will lose their DACA protections every day between October 5 and March 5. (That doesn’t count the immigrants arrested by ICE despite still having DACA, or whose DACA protections have been stripped from them after an arrest.)

But despite fears that ICE would use the information contained in DACA applications to track down and arrest immigrants, there don’t appear to have been any cases (at least, not any known to the public) in which immigrants who have lost DACA after September have actually been detained. Until now.

But what happened to Enriquez is the inevitable outcome of the way the Trump administration wound down DACA. It gave immigrants an unusually short amount of time to apply for renewal, then enforced stricter-than-usual rules about what counted as a timely application. Their current plan to allow some immigrants affected by mail delays to reapply still puts many immigrants at risk of a gap between one work permit expiring and a new one being issued. And during that time, working, driving, and existing in the US put DACA-eligible immigrants at just as much risk of deportation as any other unauthorized immigrant.

You can’t understand the current debate in Congress over how and when to help DACA recipients without understanding this phenomenon. Elected Democrats are extremely aware that people are losing DACA every day, and many moderate Republicans also note that the program is less effective the longer it’s allowed to wind down. But Republican leadership isn’t thinking about the program’s efficacy; it’s focused on the March 5 “deadline” set by the White House, and sees no need to take action before then.

At present, Democrats are trying to figure out if the urgency of DACA is enough to withhold votes on a must-pass government funding bill days before Christmas — risking a government shutdown — or whether to allow the issue to fall into 2018. If they pick the latter, they’ll have to hope that Republicans see the March 5 deadline as a serious deadline, like a government funding bill, and not a “deadline” like funding the Children’s Health Insurance Program (which Congress has allowed to lapse for 73 days and counting).

And in the meantime, Osman Enriquez, and perhaps others like him, will be waiting in a detention cell for Congress to make up its mind.

CORRECTION: This article originally identified the CWS staffer in Lancaster as “Carrie Hussein,” a name she no longer goes by. Her name is now Carrie Carranza.

The latest sexual harassment controversy on Capitol Hill is coming from a woman Democratic lawmaker, who recently seemed to suggest that women themselves are inviting the harassment with the clothes they wear.

At a private Democratic caucus meeting this morning, Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-OH) reportedly chastised her fellow women Congress members and staffers for wearing “revealing” clothing, according to a report by Politico’s Heather Caygle.

“I saw a member yesterday with her cleavage so deep it was down to the floor,” Kaptur said, sources present told Politico. “And what I’ve seen … it's really an invitation.”

Kaptur, 71, added that women working on Capitol Hill should take prompts from the military or private corporations when choosing their outfits.

“Maybe I’ll get booed for saying this, but many companies and the military [have] a dress code,” she said. “I have been appalled at some of the dress of ... members and staff. Men have to wear ties and suits.”

Kaptur’s comments reportedly left her colleagues in the room “stunned,” some people so much that their mouths fell open.

In a statement provided to Politico, Kaptur later apologized for her comments.

“When I was first elected to Congress my office and I became a refuge for female staffers who had been mistreated by their bosses. Some of them in tears many days. It is something I carry with me to this day and something I brought up during our Caucus meeting," she said. "Under no circumstances is it the victim's fault if they are harassed in any way. I shared the stories from my time here in the context of the ‘Me Too’ legislation and how we can elevate the decorum and the dress code to protect women from what is a pervasive problem here and in society at large.”

Earlier this year, Speaker of the House Paul Ryan relaxed the dress code in the House of Representatives after some women complained they were being barred from certain events or press conferences for wearing sleeveless dresses.

The official death toll from Hurricane Maria is 64. The data suggests it’s more than 1,000.

Two Democratic members of Congress are pushing for a federal investigation of hurricane-related deaths in Puerto Rico in light of mounting evidence suggesting that the official figure of 64 deaths has been “artificially suppressed.”

Rep. Nydia Velázquez (D-NY) and Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-MS) sent a letter to the Government Accountability Office on Wednesday citing analyses by Vox, The New York Times, and other media outlets that found the actual death toll may be at least 1,000. They’re asking the GAO to audit and evaluate the Puerto Rican government’s methodology in calculating the death toll.

“Donald Trump came to Puerto Rico and shamefully bragged that the death toll was something to be proud of,” Velázquez said in a statement. “In the meantime, every credible statistical analysis suggests that the actual loss of life is staggeringly higher than the official numbers. We need an impartial analysis of how many people have died and are dying from Maria in Puerto Rico so the public fully grasps the magnitude of this humanitarian crisis and our government responds appropriately.”

As Vox reported, social science researchers who used mortality data from the Puerto Rico Vital Statistics System to compare the historical death averages for September and October to deaths this year found that the number of people who died from the storm is closer to 1,085. A New York Times analysis of similar data found that the death toll could be at least 1,052.

If the government’s death toll is indeed as inaccurate as these analyses suggest it is, there are immediate, serious consequences for the people of Puerto Rico, the lawmakers said.

“In coming weeks, as Congress considers additional aid for hurricane-impacted areas, including Puerto Rico, the official death count will likely shape the scope and direction of federal assistance,” Velázquez and Thompson wrote in the letter.

Velázquez and Thompson have been pressing for a federal review of the death count since October, after Vox and other media outlets found evidence that dozens of hurricane deaths were not included in the government's count.

In early October, they asked the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees FEMA, to conduct an audit on Puerto Rico’s death count. Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey then demanded the same.

In the letter to the GAO, they say they were rebuffed by FEMA administrator Brock Long, who told them last week that the agency plays no role in determining cause of deaths.

Now they are hoping the GAO will take the lead. The nonpartisan congressional watchdog’s role includes “auditing agency operations to determine whether federal funds are being spent efficiently and effectively.”

Here’s what Velázquez and Thompson are requesting:

An audit of Puerto Rico’s death toll methodology

An explanation of whether GAO believes with any confidence that the official death count offered by the Puerto Rican government reflects the death toll on the Island from Maria

An evaluation of why this methodology is or is not sufficient in accurately examining deaths from natural disasters

An explanation of how Puerto Rico’s procedures in this area differ from other states or localities

A summary of the most widely used methods for determining death counts by all states and localities in the US

Recommendations for improving this process in Puerto Rico and providing uniformity for death counts during future disasters in other states and localities

With Rian Johnson at the helm, Episode VIII examines power and brings hope to a weary universe.

When it was released in 1977, the first Star Wars movie only bore the title Star Wars. Later, the subtitle A New Hope was added — and with it, a subtle intimation of what this series is all about. The Star Wars saga explores lots of ideas, but one it keeps cycling back to is the idea of hope. Where does it come from? Why? And when it looks like the last glimmer of hope has been extinguished, is there any reason to go on?

For decades, each Star Wars installment has explored those ideas, moving from hope to despair and back again as a fundamentally moral political battle wages between a dark side bent on its own immense power and a scrappy bunch of rebels who dare to think everyone matters. And now, 40 years after it all started, the eighth installment in the Star Wars series, The Last Jedi, retreads that basic setup with a mastery that isn’t just reminiscent of the series’ best entries, but takes its place alongside them.

The Last Jedi moves The Force Awakens’ characters forward

I don’t want to spoil the movie for you. You don’t want that either.

So let me just say...

(Seriously, if you don’t want any spoilers at ALL, not even basic place-setting stuff, then just take my word for it and go see the movie.)

...that The Last Jedi picks up more or less exactly where The Force Awakens left off, with the evil First Order ready to strike back against Resistance forces in retaliation for destroying their superweapon, the Starkiller Base. The rebel army is still led by General Leia Organa (the late Carrie Fisher, in her final Star Wars appearance). Hotshot Resistance pilot Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac) — with his droid pal BB-8 — is out in front in the counterattack, going briefly rogue to accomplish his mission, while Finn (John Boyega) is healing from the wounds inflicted on him by Darth Vader heir-apparent Kylo Ren (Adam Driver, who continues to knock it out of the park).

LucasfilmAdam Driver in Star Wars: The Last Jedi.

Meanwhile, on the faraway planet Ahch-To, Rey (Daisy Ridley) — who now knows she can harness the Force herself — has just encountered Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) and handed him his lightsaber.

The Last Jedi follows the resistance fighters as they struggle to survive through an increasingly painful series of blows, exacerbated by the First Order’s newfound ability to track their forces through hyperspace jumps. This realization sends Finn and ship’s engineer Rose (a fantastic Kelly Marie Tran) to a new planet where they search for someone who can help them. Meanwhile, though Rey and Kylo Ren are far away from one another, they seem to be experiencing a psychic connection that suggests the answers to some of their questions about themselves and each other may lie in surprising places.

The Last Jedi doesn’t just feel like a Star Wars movie — it feels like a movie

The strength of 2015’s The Force Awakens came from its careful retreading of ground that was already broken by earlier Star Wars films, in ways that pleased fans who were terrified this new trilogy would repeat the mistakes of George Lucas’s “prequel” trilogy. The Force Awakens calmed fears, reminded viewers why the series worked in the first place, and introduced a more diverse set of characters that made the whole Star Wars thing feel fresh and fun again.

And yet, if The Force Awakens was a great variation on a theme, then The Last Jedi is another movement altogether in the symphony. There are images in this movie that provoke awe and delight, and creatures that feel lifted out of half-remembered childhood dreams. And though it briefly appears to lose steam in the middle, that’s short-lived, with a third act harboring sequences that feel like a maestro conducting a concerto the size of the cosmos.

LucasfilmJohn Boyega in Star Wars: The Last Jedi.

There is catharsis aplenty, something the Star Wars movies are designed for, encouraging us to cheer when our favorite characters show up on screen and letting us thrill to the chases and the romance and the vistas and the explosions and the lightsaber battles. (This installment has one of the most purely perfect lightsaber battles the series has yielded thus far.) But as written and directed by Rian Johnson, The Last Jedi doesn’t just feel like a well-executed Star Wars movie — it feels like a well-executed movie, period, one that keeps its eye on the relationships between characters, and how they communicate with one another, in addition to the bigger picture.

Some of this has to do with the fact that The Force Awakens did the heavy lifting by introducing (or in some cases reintroducing) these characters to us, so Johnson doesn’t have to start from scratch. But one of Johnson’s strengths as a writer and director has always been injecting humanity and intelligence into characters who live inside familiar genres; they’re definitely characters, but they’re people, too. He knows how to make us feel for them.

LucasfilmKelly Marie Tran and John Boyega in Star Wars: The Last Jedi.

That means that a character like the loser General Hux (Domhnall Gleeson as a marvelous sad sap), locked in his eternal battle with Kylo Ren for dominance and the attention of Supreme Commander Snoke (Andy Serkis), is the butt of many jokes, but he also has a glimmer of the unwanted pet dog about him that lends a little pathos to our scorn.

It means we get a character like Rose, who trips believably over herself when she first meets Resistance Hero Finn, but quickly shows she’s brilliant, and has a strong and courageous side too. It means Luke becomes more than a reclusive hero-in-waiting, coming to recognize the battle that’s been raging inside of him and how it colors the way he interacts with the world, and with Rey.

Thanks to Johnson’s impish sense of humor, the film is littered with jokes — some of the best obviously nod to various fan theories that have sprung up in The Force Awaken’s wake — as well as allusions to other films and a truly wonderful menagerie of fauna ranging far beyond the already-beloved puffin-like porgs, all of which brings warmth and humor to a story that is, at its core, very serious.

But the best details are in the strong bonds that develop between characters, and the way those bonds show who each individual really is. When one character says that the only way to live free is to not join, it’s the film’s encapsulation of what constitutes a bad guy: Star Wars films are testaments to the idea that nobody, not even a Jedi Master, can go it alone without getting destroyed.

The Last Jedi is a ray of hope and an examination of power

The Last Jedi is also a deeply political film, though not in the sense that it’s “the film we need right now,” designed to speak to our “current moment” — in a saga as mythic and timeless as Star Wars, that would be a serious mischaracterization. But Star Wars is fundamentally cyclical, a story of generations and history, and the ways that wars can be won in one generation and lost in the next if memory of the past isn’t preserved. That’s the story in the films, but it’s also the story of the films, with people who grew up watching Star Wars movies now bringing their children to new Star Wars movies. And it’s no spoiler to say that the generational nature of its tale is something The Last Jedi alludes to explicitly several times.

Since the movies are part of our world as much as their own, it’s only natural they’d speak to the big, important ideas that animate political questions of every age. One of the biggest of those is whether power is ultimately a corrupting force, or if it can be wielded for good, and by whom.

LucasfilmDomnhall Gleeson in Star Wars: The Last Jedi.

In the Star Wars universe, power (often embodied in an ability to control the Force) is indeed a potent corruptor, one that’s hard to walk away from once you’ve gotten a taste. This is what lies behind the stories of the villainous Sith order, but it’s a tension that the heroic Jedi face, too.

In The Last Jedi, the factors determining how power will be wielded and yielded are an awareness of history and — most importantly — a connection to that history through the people around you. It would spoil the story to say much more, but in several key scenes, characters face a choice between following the right path and disconnecting from their pasts and from others. The choice is clear, and the images near the film’s end underline it in moving fashion.

That’s nothing new for Star Wars, which has always been a space opera about a family. But this particular iteration drives home that point in a manner that feels, on the tail end of a wearying year, like a deep point of relief, and even joy. Watching lengthy sequences involving heroic, complex characters played by black and Asian and Latinx characters, we can see a future worth living in. Being told that one character was “more interested in protecting the light than she was in seeming like a hero” is a reminder about wielding power well that feels deeply truthful and necessary today.

LucasfilmDaisy Ridley in Star Wars: The Last Jedi.

I didn’t grow up with Star Wars, or much pop culture at all. I only saw the films as an adult, and while I’ve always liked them, I never connected to them the way so many people have; whatever it was they were trying to give me never really found its place in my heart. I went to The Last Jedi with high expectations because of the talent behind it, but I was prepared to just have a good time. And I walked out feeling many emotions, but especially something like hope, that elusive thing with feathers (though hope, to be clear, is not a porg).

I felt expectant, and I believed not just that what the movie was saying was true — that even a small band of people with purpose, conviction, and a good, true story to tell can carry on in the face of evil — but that there’s a special power to saying it in a movie.

Star Wars has been with us for four decades now, telling that same essential story in a format that’s overwhelming and engulfing. With wit, skill, and love, The Last Jedi takes up the torch and carries it for a new generation.

Roy Moore’s surprising defeat in Alabama included evidence of a slight dip in the number of evangelical Christians participating in the Alabama election. Based on the exit polls, it appears that a small group of self-identifying white evangelicals stayed home instead of voting Republican as they had in previous elections. Also, 2 percent of evangelicals and conservatives said they wrote in a candidate, a significant total in such a close outcome.

Still, among those white voters who identified as evangelicals, a robust 80 percent voted for Roy Moore. This is the same percentage of self-described white evangelicals nationally who supported Donald Trump in the 2016 election.

During this fall’s campaign, the controversy over Moore and his alleged cases of sexual assault produced a predictable storyline about the “evangelical” response to Moore. One widely reported polling statistic had 37 percent of Alabama “evangelicals” saying that they were “more likely” to support Moore following the allegations.

As a professor who studies the history of Christianity — and an evangelical — I find myself continually frustrated with news pieces like this. When I read such stories about “evangelicals,” I wonder who these “evangelicals” actually are, and why much of the media is so eager to peddle storylines, however implausible, related to evangelical hypocrisy.

Anyone who thought for a second about the supposed evangelical reaction to Moore should have been incredulous. To me, the charges against Moore are disturbing and disqualifying. Many of his supporters disagree. But really, would anybody tell a pollster that allegations that a candidate had sexually abused minors would make them more inclined to support that candidate?

Whoever these “evangelicals” might be, they’re obviously saying that they don’t believe the charges against Moore, and they’re sticking by their man in the face of “fake news.” (43% of voters said in exit polling that they thought the charges were “definitely or probably false.) I’m not trying to defend Moore here, I’m just suggesting that the power of the “fake news” theme gives Moore’s defenders a ready response against the explosive charges women have made against him.

Nate Silver called out this silly interpretation on Twitter:

I'm seeing this data point cited a LOT and would encourage some caution about interpreting it.For most voters, "more likely to support after allegations" means "I'm a Moore supporter & don't believe the allegations" and not "I approve of the conduct the allegations allege". https://t.co/KfYsoS0zhv

It’s an all-too-common cycle. Some in the media believe and promote the absolute worst about evangelicals. Those evangelicals then lament fake news, even when the news (like the charges against Moore) seems not so fake.

Part of this is just a fundamental problem with polling. There are so many possible meanings left open by the way a question is framed, the context in which it is asked, the person responding, and the reporter’s interpretation.

Even more problematic, these stories employ a vague concept of “evangelical,” a term that has become almost totally disconnected from its historic meaning. Since 1980 and the rise of the Moral Majority, “evangelical” has become a descriptor more associated with politics than with theology or Christian practices. Evangelical spokespeople from Jerry Falwell to Franklin Graham have done as much as the secular media to create this impression. It has left us with a deeply diluted public image of what the word means. Polls make this problem worse by relying on self-identification of evangelicals, and evangelical self-definition has shifted over time.

I suspect that large numbers of these people who identify as “evangelicals” are really just whites who watch Fox News and who consider themselves religious.

To me, the controversy involving the reasons for evangelical support for Roy Moore reveals how little we understand evangelicals as a group in modern America.

Who really identifies as “evangelical” today?

One challenge in determining what “evangelicals” believe is the difficulty in getting solid polling data on any subject. Observers have noted that ever since the advent of cellphones, reliable polling has become ever more difficult. Polls routinely get no more than a 10 percent response rate. Some academic experts, including sociologist colleagues of mine at Baylor, have begun to despair about using polls to gather reliable information about anything at all.

The second difficulty is this self-identification issue. Some polls do use other means of determining who an evangelical is, such as church affiliation. But most pollsters simply ask a person if they identify as an evangelical, and if the answer is yes, then that person is taken to have evangelical views about Donald Trump’s latest antics, or whatever the topic is.

This is highly dubious. For instance, if you ask more probing questions, it turns out that significant numbers of these “evangelicals” do not go to church. One study of the 2016 GOP primaries showed that these non-churchgoing evangelicals were more likely to support Trump — around 53 percent of Trump supporting evangelicals marked that they seldom/never went to church. That percentage dropped to around 36 percent for Trump-supporting evangelicals who went to church weekly. Of course, a strong majority of self-identified evangelicals went on to support Trump in the general election.

In many cases, we have no idea how many of these “evangelicals” read the Bible regularly, have been born again, or share other hallmarks of historic evangelicalism. A recent study from LifeWay Research suggests that less than half of self-identifying evangelicals are deeply committed to classic evangelical beliefs.

To be fair, many polls do explicitly break out white voters from black, Hispanic, and other voters, giving some additional texture to the political views among self-identified evangelicals — so not all polls are free of nuance. And if my hunch is correct, it would be worth investigating how the term “evangelical” became code for a kind of nominal Christianity in America.

Evangelical Christianity was founded to combat nominal Christianity

The thing is, evangelical Christianity was founded to combat nominal Christianity, meaning a Christianity that is more a cultural label than a vital, active faith. Most experts trace the origins of evangelical Christianity to the mid-1700s and the coming of the Great Awakening. Many countries in those days, including Britain and its colonies, had established denominations and churches: government-funded religion. Having tax-supported churches and ministers often bred complacency and corruption. It did not foster voluntary, heartfelt devotion to God.

Revival preachers like John Wesley, Jonathan Edwards, and George Whitefield — the most famous person in Britain and America in 1740 — told people that it was not good enough to be baptized into your local church, just by accident of birthplace. You needed to make a personal, transforming commitment to Christ, an experience that the Bible referred to as being “born again.” This “new birth” would lead to a life centered on the “gospel” of salvation through Christ.

What today’s “evangelicals” have in common

The most common definition of evangelicalism, one crafted by British historian David Bebbington, boils down to four key points. First is conversion, or the need to be born again. The second is Biblicism, or the need to base one’s faith fundamentally on the Bible. The third is the theological priority of the cross, where Jesus died and won forgiveness for sinners. The final attribute of evangelicals is activism, or acting on the mandates of one’s faith, through supporting your church, sharing the gospel, and engaging in charitable endeavors.

In today’s media, “evangelical” has shifted from the historic definition to become more of a rough political and ethnic signifier. What today’s “evangelicals” have in common is not so much Biblicism or action for the gospel, but a self-defined sense of religiosity and a dogged commitment to Republican politics. And being white.

Evangelical faith has always had political ramifications, of course. For example, many evangelicals fought in the era of the American Revolution to end the tax-supported denominations, which had often persecuted evangelicals. But evangelicals were not much on the political radar screen in modern America until 1976, with the candidacy of the “born again” Jimmy Carter.

But 1980 and the Reagan Revolution convinced many evangelicals that they could have both piety and political power. The most visible evangelical leaders became not evangelists like Billy Graham but political operatives and, later, Fox News contributors. Most of the news media was happy to focus on this new political brand of evangelicalism, even if it became more and more distant from its historic roots.

The image of political evangelicalism fails to recognize most of what was happening in the weekly routines of actual evangelical Christians and their churches. As Bebbington’s definition suggests, most of a typical evangelical’s life has nothing to do with politics.

Finally, as seen in the story on growing “evangelical” support for Roy Moore, the news media lovesstories on “evangelical” hypocrisy. Evangelicals have always been capable of hypocrisy, of course. Anyone who wears their faith on their sleeve is going to be held to a higher standard, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But too often, we actually know little about the “evangelicals” being charged with hypocrisy. Other than political allegiances, we don’t know much about what the term evangelical means anymore.

Before you read a story and despair about the state of evangelicalism in America, then, pause for a second. The reality about evangelicals may indeed be bad and disheartening. But are polls really supplying accurate information about “evangelicals” and their beliefs? Or does our country largely misunderstand what it means to be evangelical in America today?

Both the House and Senate versions of the Republican tax bill now include provisions that would serioulsy threaten the wind and solar industries. The hemming and hawing over them is meanwhile also stalling more than $20 billion in investment in clean energy, according to Democratic lawmakers who oppose the cuts.

But here’s the catch: wind and solar are booming not just in deep blue states like California, but also in red states like Texas, Wyoming, Kansas, and Iowa.

Texas, Wyoming, Kansas, and Colorado have become leaders in renewable energy and also benefit from federal incentives for electric cars and home efficiency upgrades that could be cut under the bill.

The main issue for renewables is a provision in the Senate bill called the Base Erosion Anti-Abuse Tax (BEAT). The measure is aimed at companies that move money offshore to lower their tax liability in the United States. The BEAT adds a 10 percent minimum tax on businesses that don’t include cross-border payments in their income calculations.

How does this affect renewables? In the United States, the main incentive for erecting wind turbines and mounting solar farms is a tax credit (wind developers use the production tax credit and solar uses the investment tax credit). By invoking these credits, renewable energy developers can drive their corporate tax rate below 10 percent.

For smaller companies that don’t have a large enough tax liability, they can market their excess credits to tax equity investors.

However, renewable energy projects often have multinational backers, so companies looking to bring in foreign financing may end up with a higher tax bill as they pay off creditors abroad, in some cases canceling out the tax subsidies altogether.

As the law firm McDermott Will & Emery put it, “Multinational tax equity investors reducing their US tax liability from cross-border affiliate payments may therefore find that investments in ITC and PTC eligible projects after enactment of the BEAT are much less attractive.”

Or as Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) put it at a press conference on Wednesday, “it would kneecap clean energy.”

He added that the uncertainty of this provision has put investments in limbo, hampering an industry that would employ 500,000 Americans by 2020. The coal industry, by contrast, currently employs 50,000 people.

An analysis by the Rhodium Group noted that there are some places where the House and Senate versions of the tax bill differ. The House bill strips out the $7,500 tax credit for electric cars, while the Senate version leaves it in, for example. It also cuts the wind tax credit from 2.4 cents per kilowatt-hour to 1.5 cents.

But even the threat of these changes is already having an impact, according to some in the industry.

“We’re already seeing orders put on hold and projects not able to get refinancing,” Michael Goggin, the senior director of research at the American Wind Energy Association, told the New York Times. “Even the threat of this bill is having a chilling effect.”

Some Republicans may try to preserve the clean energy tax credits

Lawmakers are now desperately trying to strike deals to preserve incentives for renewables in the bill they’re aiming to send to the White House before Christmas.

"As the father of the wind energy production tax credit, I've fought for renewable energies like wind power that diversify our energy supply and create good-paying jobs," Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) told E&E News last week. "I'm aware of the argument that the provision could negatively impact some renewable energy projects. I'm currently looking into the matter further."

Sen. Cory Gardner says the BEAT issue has not been resolved yet. Says “progress is being made.” (Caution: This could be congress speak for “I didn’t get what I wanted.”)

With a narrow vote margin and a looming end-of-year deadline, some Republicans have suggested excising the clean energy aspects of the bill altogether.

"We've got to be careful not to cost ourselves votes on the tax relief bill," Sen. John Hoeven (R-ND) told E&E News this week. "We'll see what comes out of conference, but the general sense, at least I got, was that's why we probably won't get into a number of those issues in this bill, we'll just focus on the tax relief."

The question now is whether the tax bill, which contains a buffet of other unpopular provisions, will win the support of enough Republicans to pass in a vote expected next week. There is also the possibility of a separate bill with tax extenders for energy.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas announced Wednesday that the Palestinians will no longer work with American peace negotiators in the wake of President Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital on December 6, the first serious diplomatic fallout from the deeply controversial move.

Speaking to a conference of Muslim leaders in Istanbul, Abbas called Trump’s decision a “crime” that left the US unqualified to continue in its historic role as the main international arbiter in the conflict, a role that he said should now go to the United Nations. Leaders at the conference asked the international community to recognize East Jerusalem as the Palestinian capital.

The comments from Abbas were the Palestinians’ angriest formal response to the Trump announcement. Whether they’ll have any actual practical impact, though, is far from clear.

Abbas doesn’t have much room to maneuver these days. A public opinion poll published on Wednesday by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research found that, unsurprisingly, more than 90 percent of Palestinians reject Trump’s announcement. But it also found that 70 percent of those polled want Abbas to step down.

In part that’s because Abbas angered many of his own people by publicly cozying up to a president widely seen as a close ally and uncritical supporter of the Israeli government.

When Trump and Abbas met back in May at the White House, Trump assured the press that the Palestinian leader would soon be back in Washington to sign a peace deal with the Israelis. “I want to support you in being the Palestinian leader who signs his name to the final and most important peace agreement that brings safety, security, and prosperity to both peoples and to the region,” Trump told Abbas at the time. He then promised to be a mediator for the peace process.

Abbas, in turn, gushed to the president that his “courageous stewardship” would create the capacity, on all sides, “to be true partners to bring about a historic peace treaty,”

By late summer, the Palestinians were feeling decidedly less enthusiastic.

Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and a point person on the peace process, visited both Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Abbas in the region the last week of August. “The status quo is not working for our interests,” Ahmad Majdalani, a member of Abbas’s staff, told the press before Kushner visited.

But Kushner’s attentions had Abbas expressing hope once more. “We greatly appreciate the efforts of US President Donald Trump who pledged from the beginning that he is going to work for the ultimate deal," the Palestinian leader said before his conversation with Kushner.

"We know things are difficult and complicated, but nothing is impossible with good intentions."

He sure isn’t using words like that now.

Palestinians are promising not to work with Trump. That may not mean much.

Israelis and Palestinians both claim Jerusalem as their capital. Though Israel’s parliament and the prime minister’s home are in Jerusalem, they sit in West Jerusalem, the side of the city Israel has controlled since 1949. Israel captured East Jerusalem in 1967 and annexed that half of the city. The international community views that land as occupied territory; the Palestinians would like it to be their capital one day.

Since 1988 and the beginning of a peace process that envisioned a two-state solution to the conflict — that is, an independent Palestinian state and an independent Israeli state side by side — US policy has been to leave the status of Jerusalem to be decided by the two sides as part of a final peace agreement.

Trump’s statement last week changed that policy.

The Palestinian leadership is reeling from Trump’s decision -- and their own choices to trust him despite their initial misgivings, according to Khaled Elgindy, a fellow in the Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution. Trump’s announcement, he told me Monday, “[was] a huge setback — I can’t overstate how devastating this is for this Palestinian leadership.”

In the days leading up to Trump’s announcement last week, Abbas said recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and moving the US Embassy from Tel Aviv would have grave consequences “for the peace process and security and stability in the region and world.”

But while many thousands did take to the streets in Jerusalem, the West Bank, Lebanon, Morocco, Yemen, Indonesia, and Turkey, by Monday morning they had begun to walk away. Leaders around the world condemned Trump’s decision, and the region remains on edge, but the response has been, thus far, less robust than anticipated.

That’s not to say there wasn’t violence: Four Palestinian protesters were killed in clashes with Israeli security forces, and hundreds were wounded. On Sunday afternoon, a lone Palestinian attacker stabbed an Israeli security guard. But those incidents thus far have remained isolated and, until now, haven’t sparked wider protests.

Immediately following Trump’s statement of recognition, Abbas’s office announced that no Palestinian leader would meet with Vice President Mike Pence when he arrives in the region next week.

Now Abbas is promising a much fuller break with the US. It remains to be seen whether he carries through with the threat — and whether, given the currently moribund peace process, those words change anything at all.

It’s long been very difficult to plot a plausible path to a Democratic Senate takeover in 2018, since the party faces such a disadvantage in the map. Democrats have needed to gain, on net, three seats. Assuming they defend all 26 of their own that are up (no easy task), there are then two Republican-held seats — Nevada and Arizona — that have seemed seriously in play.

But the other six Republican seats up next year have long seemed like long shots — meaning it was difficult to envision where Democrats could pick up that elusive third GOP-controlled seat. Not anymore, though — as former Obama administration staffer Matthew Miller tweeted after Jones won, the magic number for the party is now down to two:

Six months ago, I asked the smartest Dem Senate strategist where the three seats to win the majority back were: "Nevada, Arizona, and an act of God." Got the hardest one first.

The Alabama result also serves as a reminder that seemingly uncompetitive races can, under certain circumstances, tighten up. A divisive GOP primary ended in the controversial Moore defeating the party establishment’s preferred candidate. The race was closer than expected even before Moore was accused of sexually assaulting two teenagers last month; after it, Jones got enough of a boost to win.

So it’s a good time to review the entire lineup of Republican Senate seats on the ballot — or that could plausibly be on the ballot — in 2018. We can think of them as follows:

The top two targets: Nevada and Arizona

Two tougher targets: Texas and Tennessee

The possibility that John McCain’s seat in Arizona will also open up

The rest: Wyoming, Nebraska, Utah, and Mississippi (and any other potential special elections)

I’m going to focus on these GOP-held seats, but also just keep in mind that Democrats would also have to play an enormous amount of defense in 2018. Of the 26 of their own seats on the ballot, 10 will be in states Trump won, and five of those will be in states he won overwhelmingly. And for each of their incumbents who does lose, the number of GOP-held seats Democrats would have to win to retake control would go up by one.

The top two targets: Nevada and Arizona

Dean Heller of Nevada has long been the most endangered Republican Senate incumbent, since his is the only GOP-held seat up in a state Trump lost (Hillary Clinton won it by 2.5 points). But things have only gotten worse for him over the course of this year. First, he infuriated conservatives by trying to negotiate changes to the Obamacare repeal bill, and then he infuriated liberals by utterly caving on the issue after reportedly getting an earful from billionaire donors. More recently, he bragged that he “helped write” the deeply unpopular GOP tax bill.

In the general election, Heller will likely face Rep. Jacky Rosen, a Democrat who was first elected to the House of Representatives just last year, but who won the nod of the Democratic establishment in this race. But first he has to get past a primary challenge from Danny Tarkanian, who’s said he’s won the backing of party gadfly Steve Bannon. And though polling of the primary has been sparse so far, Tarkanian has led in some of the ones we’ve seen — signaling a tough road ahead for Heller.

The second obvious target for Democrats is the Arizona seat currently held by Sen. Jeff Flake (R-AZ), who is retiring. Republican leaders hope that Rep. Martha McSally, a retired Air Force colonel, will win the nomination, but she’d face an ugly primary fight against former state Sen. Kelli Ward. Ward is a favorite of some populist conservatives in the state (as well as Bannon), but is viewed by the establishment as a fringe figure who could lose big. Democratic leaders, meanwhile, successfully convinced their preferred candidate — Rep. Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) — to run, and she’s the favorite to win the nomination.

To reiterate: If Democrats manage to hold all of their own seats (something that, again, will be quite difficult!), and win just these two GOP-held seats, they’ll end up with a 51-49 Senate majority in 2019.

Two tougher targets: Texas and Tennessee

Tasos Katopodis/WireImage/GettyTed Cruz

Moving on to Republican seats that are much more of a reach for Democrats — but maybe not completely safe for the GOP — there’s Ted Cruz’s seat in Texas, and the seat of retiring Sen. Bob Corker in Tennessee.

For years, Democrats have been dreaming of making serious gains in Texas — and for years, they’ve failed to do so, despite the growth in the state’s Hispanic population. In 2016, though, Donald Trump only won the state by 9 points, the worst performance for a GOP presidential nominee there in decades. And the senator up for reelection in 2018 is Ted Cruz, a controversial figure with many enemies, who currently has a weak approval rating.

This time around, Democrats have a charismatic and energetic challenger for Cruz in Rep. Beto O’Rourke (a former punk rocker who my colleague Jeff Stein interviewed earlier this year). O’Rourke very definitely an underdog — Texas is a conservative state, it’s an expensive state to compete in, Cruz is a formidable fundraiser, and O’Rourke is still little-known. Still, if the fired-up Democratic enthusiasm we’ve seen this year holds up, this race might end up being closer than many expect.

Next, there is the Tennessee seat currently held by Sen. Bob Corker (R), who is retiring. Donald Trump won Tennessee by a whopping 26 points, so this race is definitely a stretch for Democrats. But former Gov. Phil Bredesen (D) has decided to jump into the race — and though he hasn’t run for office since 2006 and could be a bit rusty, he has won statewide before. The likely GOP nominee is Rep. Marsha Blackburn, a staunch conservative.

Then, John McCain is not in good health

Jennifer Stewart/Getty

It may be impolite to discuss it, but Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) has brain cancer and, he says, a “poor prognosis.” If McCain should pass away or decide to step down in the coming months, his seat would be temporarily filled by an appointee from Arizona’s Republican governor, and a special election to fill the remaining four years of McCain’s term would be scheduled at the same time as the 2018 midterms.

If this were to happen, Arizona would suddenly have both of its US Senate seats on the ballot next year — giving Democrats another pickup opportunity in a state Trump won by just 3.5 points.

Some of the possible Democratic candidates in that scenario would likely be people who considered running for Flake’s seat but ended up declining — like Phoenix Mayor Greg Stanton or former Rep. Ann Kirkpatrick (both of whom are currently running for congressional seats), or State Rep. Randall Friese (a trauma surgeon who treated former Rep. Gabby Giffords after her shooting).

As for Republicans, depending on the timing of the vacancy, likely primary rivals Kelli Ward and Martha McSally could end up running in different races after all. Arizona has several other ambitious Republican members of Congress and state politicians too. For now, though, McCain remains in the Senate and has expressed no plans to step down.

The rest

Rafael Suanes/MCT/MCT via GettyOrrin Hatch

The other remaining GOP-held Senate seats are in such deeply conservative states that few would give Democrats more than an infinitesimal chance of winning any of them. Still, Doug Jones did just pull off his longest-of-shots upset, so let’s run through the remaining possibilities on the table:

Utah: There’s some intrigue around this seat, as 83-year-old Sen. Orrin Hatch (R) has been viewed as likely to retire but hasn’t confirmed his plans to do so just yet. If he does retire, former presidential candidate Mitt Romney will likely run for the GOP nomination. In either case, Salt Lake County Council member Jenny Wilson is running for the Democratic nod.

Wyoming: Sen. John Barrasso (R-WY), who’s close to Mitch McConnell and serves on the GOP Senate leadership team, is running again. Bannon and his allies have mused about recruiting a wealthy conservative — like investor Foster Friess or Blackwater founder Erik Prince — to challenge him in the primary. For Democrats, Jackson Hole businessman Gary Trauner announced last week that he’ll run.

Nebraska: Sen. Deb Fischer (R-NE) will be up for reelection. A conservative in a conservative state, Fischer has nevertheless had a difficult time adapting to the age of Trump — she called on him to leave the race last October after the Access Hollywood “grab ’em by the pussy” tape was released, but then said a few days later that she’d vote for him anyway. Businesswoman and Lincoln City Council member Jane Raybould is running for the Democratic nomination there.

Mississippi: The genial, leadership-aligned Sen. Roger Wicker (R-MS) might face a conservative primary challenge from Chris McDaniel (who nearly won a contentious Senate primary in the state in 2014). It’s not yet clear who the strongest Democratic candidate would be here.

Another special: Finally, it’s of course possible that another unexpected special election could be added to the lineup. For instance, Sen. Thad Cochran (R-MS) has been in poor health, and there have been reports that President Trump might nominate Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) to head the CIA.

Both Mississippi and Arkansas are such conservative states, as are the others mentioned here. But again ... Doug Jones did win.

This is the web version of VoxCare, a daily newsletter from Vox on the latest twists and turns in America’s health care debate. Like what you’re reading? Sign up to get VoxCare in your inbox here.

Obamacare repeal might really, actually, truly be dead.

Doug Jones, a Democrat, will soon be Alabama's junior senator. The Republican Senate majority will shrink from 52 to 51.

Republicans have sworn to revisit Obamacare repeal next year, after they pass their tax bill. But Jones's victory may have made it impossible for the GOP to succeed where it has previously failed.

Even with 52 Republican senators, the party had yet to find a plan that could win 50 votes. Now the margin for error is even slimmer.

I surveyed a handful of health care lobbyists well-attuned to congressional Republicans on Tuesday night, once Jones had shocked the political world: Is Obamacare repeal dead?

A couple flatly said "yes." One proffered that they still might try. But the odds seem to be fading, and fast.

Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) seems to be a "no" on any major Obamacare repeal plan. Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) has also opposed every bill put forward so far. Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) has shown he's willing to buck his party on health care too. Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) has refused to back any of the substantial repeal-and-replace bills, including Graham-Cassidy, which was the top candidate to be revived if Republicans took up the issue again.

Now you're subtracting Sen. Luther Strange (R-AL), a reliable vote for Republican leaders, and adding Doug Jones, who has said that while the Affordable Care Act could still be improved, "repeal and replace" is just a political slogan that's "not workable."

Then there is one other thing to consider. Republicans are hoping to pass their tax overhaul in a matter of days.

In that bill, they are planning to repeal Obamacare's individual mandate, which will lead to an estimated 13 million fewer people having insurance and higher premiums, according to the CBO.

But the mandate is also by far the least popular part of Obamacare, the foundation of much of the GOP's opposition to the law. Might they now be content to let repeal go, once they nix the mandate, while leaving the more popular pieces of the law in place?

One lobbyist compared it to Democrats passing Obamacare in 2010. They knew it was unpopular at the time. But they had committed to passing it. It was a "suicide pact" of sorts. Republicans face a similar choice now.

"Looking at the polls and their majorities, do they decide to go after (fill in the blank with the ACA, Medicare, Medicaid, or all of the above) because they know they may never get another chance?" this person said. "It makes no sense, but when does a suicide pact make sense?"

But with the stunning Democratic win in Alabama yesterday, the math might simply be insurmountable. We'll be watching closely, of course, but at long last, Obamacare repeal might really be finished.

Chart of the Day

Avalere

Obamacare enrollment has fallen behind. At this point, it's pretty much impossible to see how sign-ups for 2018 could catch up to 2016 or 2017 levels. It would probably require about 3 million people to enroll in the last week.

Kliff’s Notes

“Why This Is Obamacare’s Do-Or-Die Week”: “'This week is the entire ball game,' the Kaiser Family Foundation’s Larry Levitt told TPM. 'A growing enrollment means a healthier risk pool. Declining enrollment means a sicker risk pool. What happens this week will also determine the political narrative about whether the ACA is succeeding or failing.'” —Alice Ollstein, Talking Points Memo

“House GOP lawmakers look to delay Cadillac tax, other ACA taxes”: “The Affordable Care Act taxes are all on the U.S. House of Representatives' chopping block. Republicans on the House Ways and Means Committee introduced a bundle of bills on Tuesday to delay the Cadillac tax, employer mandate and other taxes that healthcare industry groups have opposed.” —Susannah Luthi, Modern Healthcare

“GOP chairman: CHIP must be attached to next funding bill”: “House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Greg Walden (R-Ore.) said Tuesday that funding for a major children's health insurance program needs to be included in a short-term funding bill later this month. The comments from Walden, whose panel oversees the Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP), add urgency to the push to renew authorization for the program covering 9 million children.” —Peter Sullivan, the Hill

Analysis and longer reads

“The health care merger arms race”: “Executives say the deals will save money and improve care. But independent research does not support those claims, and the deals raise questions about whether some companies are gaining excessive power or undermining rivals.” —Bob Herman, Axios

“Why Do So Many People Hate Obamacare So Much?”: “The Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, has roiled America since the day it was signed into law in 2010. From the start, the public was almost evenly divided between those who supported it and those who opposed it. They still are.” —Julie Rovner, Kaiser Health News

“People Don’t Take Their Pills. Only One Thing Seems to Help.”: “When drugs cost them less, patients are more likely to fill prescriptions. Even if people have already purchased drugs, they may skip doses — or split the pills — because of concerns that they won’t be able to afford future refills.” —Austin Frakt, The Incidental Economist

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President Trump hasn’t succeeded in repealing Obamacare yet. But his administration is doing its best to force the law to fail.

The most critical time of the year for the health care law is open enrollment, when millions of people log on to online marketplaces, check whether they qualify for federal subsidies to help them pay their premiums, and shop for plans. For the past three years, at least 10 million people have gotten insurance that way each year.

Open enrollment is almost over: It ends Friday, December 15, in most states. So far, sign-ups have been somewhat strong in the face of the Trump administration’s overt sabotage. As of Dec. 9, 4.7 million people had signed up for insurance on the federal marketplace.

But they still seem likely to fall short of previous years. We can expect about 1.6 million to be automatically enrolled in a new plan at the end of open enrollment, if they haven’t actively selected a new one, based on the last two years. It would require an almost-unfathomable surge in the last week for 2018 enrollment on HealthCare.gov to match the 9.2 million in 2017. Something closer to 7.5 million or 8 million is looking more plausible.

"We expect enrollment to grow every year, not to shrink. This market is likely to shrink," Caroline Pearson, senior vice president at Avalere, a consulting firm, told me last week. "It is a big deal, for a market that's already too small and unstable."

Avalere

The difference is Trump. This year, open enrollment was in the hands of a White House that’s openly hostile to the Affordable Care Act — and the Trump administration took advantage of the best opportunity it had to undercut the law.

President Trump has said Obamacare is imploding, which he hopes would reignite the stalled congressional effort to repeal it. He didn’t just sit around waiting for that to happen. His administration halved the length of open enrollment. They slashed spending on advertising and assistance programs. They pulled out of outreach events at the last minute.

The entire health care law could be at stake. Advertising and outreach are primarily targeted to younger and healthier people, who are essential to the law’s goal of affordable insurance coverage for all Americans. If their enrollment drops while older, sicker people keep signing up, premiums are going to increase even more next year.

It could be the start of a death spiral, a self-perpetuating cycle of price hikes and falling enrollment — which is exactly what Trump seems to want.

“I think what this cumulative activity can do is start that death spiral,” Kathleen Sebelius, President Obama’s health and human services secretary during the ACA’s first open enrollment, told me.

Obamacare supporters had already conceded that as a result of these cuts, they likely won’t be able to match last year’s 12 million sign-ups. “I don’t actually think that’s possible anymore,” Lori Lodes, who worked on Obamacare enrollment in the Obama administration, told me.

We will know soon exactly how much the White House has succeeded in gutting Obamacare. By embracing this strategy, the Trump administration has put its political goals ahead of the millions of people who depend on the ACA for insurance.

“I really do think what they want to be able to do is come out on December 16 and say, ‘See, we told you Obamacare is imploding; it’s failing,’” Lodes said. “When the reality is they are going to be responsible because of the decisions they’ve made to undermine open enrollment.”

Open enrollment and outreach, explained

Every fall, the Obamacare insurance marketplaces open for business. People have a few weeks to log on, check out their options, and sign up for coverage. This year, sign-ups started on November 1 and closes on December 15.

An entire apparatus exists to support open enrollment. Most states use the federal Healthcare.gov, while a few run their own marketplaces. The feds and some states run call centers, where people can talk to a real person to walk through enrollment. The federal government funds navigator and in-person assistance programs, which set up places where people can get help navigating the sign-up process.

Open enrollment didn’t technically changed much this year, except it was shortened from 12 weeks to six. Otherwise, it is pretty much the same. Healthcare.gov is still open. People can still get tax subsidies and shop for coverage. All of the ACA’s regulations, such as protections for people with preexisting conditions and the requirement that insurers cover essential health benefits, remain in place.

But the mere need to clarify that, yes, Obamacare is still around is a big problem for open enrollment. After eight months of Republicans fighting to repeal it while claiming it’s failing, people like Lodes worry that many Americans think the law either is already gone or won’t be around for much longer.

Which is why outreach is so important.

The Obama administration went all out every year to promote open enrollment. President Obama appeared on late-night TV and viral online shows. The administration recruited celebrities to star in ads or highlight open enrollment on social media. Senior officials scrounged for as much money for the navigator program as they could find.

While things didn’t always go smoothly — the launch of Healthcare.gov was a disaster — the efforts helped 12 million people sign up for coverage in 2016. The uninsured rate has dropped to historic lows, and insurers have started to see improved business on the law’s marketplaces.

The key, Lodes said, was blanketing people with information — from television ads and email and text message reminders to working with community-based groups and churches. The biggest barrier was convincing people they could actually afford insurance, once the law’s financial assistance was accounted for.

Outreach works: The Huffington Post reported recently that an internal Health and Human Services Department report concluded that 37 percent of sign-ups in the last few months of 2016 could be attributed to outreach.

Trump administration officials have defended their outreach cuts in part by arguing that people are already familiar with Obamacare after three years. “I don’t think we can force people to sign up for a program,” a senior administration official told reporters in August.

But that runs counter to the available evidence. Nearly 40 percent of the US uninsured were still unaware of the marketplaces last year, and almost half did not know they might be eligible for financial assistance, according to surveys by the Commonwealth Fund.

“There is a difference knowing Obamacare is the law and knowing what you should do with that information,” Lodes said, “between knowing you need to sign up in this finite period of time or you do not get health coverage.”

The Commonwealth Fund

The Obama administration had assumed that older people or people with preexisting conditions who struggled to get insurance before the ACA would be eager to sign up. So they focused their efforts on reaching younger people or people who hadn’t had insurance before. Every year, people turn 26 and roll off their parents’ health insurance, or maybe they get a new job with a higher salary and need to move from Medicaid to private insurance.

Every year, in other words, there are brand new customers for the ACA marketplaces.

“They’re either the least familiar or they are the healthiest. Either way, they either don’t know or don’t believe they need or want health insurance,” Sebelius said. “For somebody to suggest that there is no persuasion needed is just nuts.”

How Trump sabotaged Obamacare enrollment

Because open enrollment is such a sprawling undertaking, the Trump administration has many tools at its disposal to undermine it and, by extension, the ACA. It seems to be using all of them.

The White House has some minimal requirements under federal law. It must perform outreach and education, it must run a call center, it must have a website where people can enroll, and it must operate a navigator program.

On paper, the Trump administration is doing each of those things. But each is facing significant cuts. Together, they add up to a clear picture of an administration using every means available to drop support for ACA enrollment:

Just a few weeks into the Trump administration, HHS announced it would reduce open enrollment from 12 weeks to six weeks.

Over the summer, Trump administration officials hinted they might not enforce the individual mandate.

In August, HHS said it would cut funding for Obamacare advertising by 90 percent, from $100 million to $10 million.

HHS also said it would cut funding for in-person assistance by 40 percent.

A few weeks later, the department let the in-person assistance budget run out entirely without awarding more money.

Late last month, the administration abruptly pulled out of state-level open enrollment events.

This month, Trump stopped federal payments to health insurers just days before open enrollment began, driving up premiums as much as 30 percent for some plans.

HHS has cut off relationships with Latino groups that had worked with the Obama administration to enroll that population in coverage, Talking Points Memo has reported.

In other words, the Trump administration cut funding for outreach, cut funding for enrollment assistance, and dropped out of partnerships to support enrollment, while shrinking the window for people to sign up for coverage, sowing doubts about whether people will be required to have insurance, and taking actions that drive up premiums.

So as Trump claims Obamacare is failing, his administration set up a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Obamacare supporters have tried to fill the gaps with grassroots programs like the Get Covered campaign, run by former Obama administration officials. But they do not have the same resources as the federal government.

The Commonwealth Fund

The ideal TV advertising campaign, for example, would cost about $15 million, said Lodes, who is helping to oversee Get Covered. They knew from the very start that they would not be able to raise that kind of money, which means the hole left by the Trump administration cutting $90 million from the ACA’s advertising budget will go largely unfilled.

“There is no way that anything we do or anyone else does can fill the footprint of what the administration should be doing,” she said. “They were unable to get repeal passed through the Congress, so they really seem intent to do everything they can do to make sure open enrollment is not successful.”

Weak enrollment is a huge threat to Obamacare’s future

The inevitable result of the Trump administration’s actions will be fewer Americans with health insurance. Last year, 12 million people signed up for coverage through the Obamacare marketplaces. Nobody expects to match that number this year, after open enrollment has been so severely undermined. Pro-Obamacare advocates had projected at least 1 million fewer people will enroll this year. Bases on the latest numbers, it looks like they were right.

“There is no doubt that the actions by the administration will mean that fewer people get covered,” Lodes said.

The number of uninsured Americans will likely tick up from its current historic lows. Hundreds of thousands or even millions will not be financially protected against a medical emergency, and it will be harder for them to afford the routine health care that prevents bigger problems later on. That will have a real effort on people’s lives and financial security.

But falling enrollment also threatens Obamacare’s future.

The law works when younger, healthier people and older, sicker people all sign up for coverage. Insurers need the low-cost patients to help cover the costs of the sicker ones, who are more likely to rack up big medical bills. The ACA has both sticks (the individual mandate) and carrots (cheaper premiums for young people and generous subsidies) to get everybody into the market.

But getting younger and healthier people takes a little more effort. They have been the focus of the outreach that Trump is now cutting.

People who have medical conditions already or who are older and know they may soon need insurance are going to find a way to enroll regardless. But young and healthy people are less likely to think they need insurance. They need some persuading that the ACA’s coverage will help them in an unlikely medical event and that they will be able to afford it, Sebelius and Lodes said.

“The last person to sign up is probably the healthiest person to sign up,” David Anderson, a former insurance industry official who now researches at Duke University, told me.

With a sicker pool left behind, health insurers are likely to either increase premiums even more next year or leave the market altogether. Plans have already cited the marketing cuts as one reason for increased premiums in 2018. And the higher premiums get, the more difficult it is to persuade young and healthy people to pay the price.

“What that means over the long term is the health of the marketplace is at risk,” Lodes said.

No matter what the president says, Obamacare isn’t failing yet. But his administration is trying as hard as it can to make those words a reality.

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It will most likely take a few weeks for Jones to be sworn into the Senate.

Doug Jones just scored a stunning victory as a Democrat in Alabama’s Senate race. The next big question is when he will take his seat in the Senate.

The timing matters because Jones’s victory narrows the Republican majority in the Senate to a tenuous 51 votes. Congressional Republicans are about to vote on a sweeping overhaul of the tax system that would slash taxes for corporations permanently, for individuals temporarily, and add more than $1 trillion to the national debt over the next decade.

But if Congress votes on the bill next week, it’s likely Jones won’t yet be there to vote for it. The timeline indicates Jones should be sworn in early January at the earliest — but there are still a couple of potential roadblocks.

It takes some time to officially certify the election results: Counties must officially file their election results by Friday, December 22, according to the Alabama Secretary of State’s office. John Bennett, chief of staff for the Alabama secretary of state, told Reuters that some counties might miss that deadline, which would mean December 26 would be the earliest for the final results to be certified.

Right now, the Republicans’ biggest legislative priority is getting their tax bill passed. They had promised to deliver it to President Trump before the end of the year. The House and Senate have reportedly reached a final agreement — but it’s not clear if all of GOP senators who voted for it initially are still on board. Jones’s victory could potentially upend that plan if the party can’t reach a final deal by the time he becomes a senator.

As Vox’s Dylan Scott writes, the Republicans passed the bill with 51 Republican votes. Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN) defected — the only Republican to do so. But Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) is beginning to push back, which would drop the vote count down to 50. Without Jones, Republicans can still pass the bill — Vice President Mike Pence will break the tie. But if Jones shows up in time:

This path to failure has become clear: Jones wins in Alabama on Tuesday, the tax negotiations drag on long enough for him to be seated, and Collins flips to a “no” vote because her extracted concessions on health care fall through.with their current numbers.

As Scott points out, this is the best-case scenario for Democrats. But Republicans also can do the math, and will push hard to deliver the tax bill before Jones arrives.

So far, McConnell hasn’t indicated that he’d delay seating Jones. But Senate Democrats are clearly worried that he will, and are pushing for Jones to be seated as soon as possible:

Doug Jones should be seated without delay. The people of Alabama have a right to be represented by the person they elected in this tax debate.

A similar debate played out in 2010, after Republican Scott Brown won a surprise victory in the Massachusetts Senate special election and deprived Democrats of a 60-vote, filibuster-proof majority in the Senate.

One option for Democrats was to push the health care bill through before Brown was seated. But then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said the day after the election that they wouldn’t act on health care until Brown was sworn in.

So far, McConnell has made no such assurance on the tax bill.

Moore hasn’t conceded yet. What does that mean?

On Tuesday night, after Jones’s victory speech, Republican Roy Moore refused to concede, saying “when the vote is this close that it's not over” and calling for a recount. Typically, a campaign demanding a recount also pushes to delay the swearing-in until after the recount is finished, which could hold up Jones being seated.

Recounts can only happen after the election results have been certified, according to AL.com, so the recount wouldn’t delay certification.

It’s not entirely clear, though, if the Alabama law even applies to candidates for federal office, as Rick Hasen writes at the Election Law Blog. And Merrill told CNN that it’s “highly unlikely” that the outcome of the vote will change. “There's not a whole lot of mistakes that are made,” he said.

“You take a picture of somebody, it says one thing. You draw a picture ... it says something completely different.”

Some of my favorite films of recent years have come from the Irish studio Cartoon Saloon, a production house that has turned out three animated films, all of which I’ve loved, and two of which have been Oscar-nominated for Best Animated Feature (the third is eligible for the next Oscar ceremony).

The Secret of Kells, an enchanting Celtic myth mash-up, led the way in 2009, with 2014’s Song of the Sea deepening that film’s storytelling techniques and themes, to heartbreaking effect. The studio’s latest release, The Breadwinner, newly in theaters throughout the country, takes on a story that wouldn’t seem a natural fit for animation — the lives of young girls amid the perpetual turmoil of Taliban-ruled Afghanistan — and turns it into a surprisingly profound story of the power of fiction, the bonds of family, and the weight of history. It’s my favorite animated film of 2017.

The Breadwinner marks the solo directorial debut for Nora Twomey, who co-directed Kells and worked on the story of Sea. The film has been adapted from the book of the same name by Deborah Ellis, and it follows the story of Parvana, a girl forced to pose as a boy to make ends meet for her family when her father is taken to prison. As she works to help her family, and find her father, the drums of war beat in the distance, culminating in a suitably dramatic climax.

For as much as The Breadwinner juggles, both in its story and thematically, it’s a little surprising that the film is an animated one. Certainly a story like this, one almost entirely about normal, everyday human beings, could have been done in live-action. And typically it would have been done in live-action.

So when Twomey joined me for the latest episode of my podcast, I Think You’re Interesting, I asked her that exact question. And her answer was perhaps the most succinct explanation I’ve heard for why animation can unlock new ways of thinking about any story, not just stories about cartoon animals going on adventures. She says:

Animation allows you to empathize with characters in a very unique way I think that live action can’t. There is something about drawing a face and expressing a face with a few lines I think which makes a character universal and makes a character easy for an individual to identify with.

For me, that’s a very exciting space as a filmmaker. To enter into that space, for me, that’s the most interesting thing. There had been a live-action film about bacha posh, the girls dressed as boys in Afghanistan, called Osama, which was released in 2003. Similar subject matter, but there’s something about animation that allowed us to layer the story as well in a way in which our audiences didn’t emotionally disengage from our characters, which might have been the case with live-action — or certainly would have been a different set of problems with live-action.

There’s also an opportunity with animation to express things. You take a picture of somebody, it says one thing. You draw a picture of that person in the same circumstances, and it says something completely different. It’s difficult to express, but it’s easy to experience.

For much more with Twomey, including discussion of finding Afghan-Canadian actors to play the roles in the film, directing a baby to say just the right things, and designing what has to be the skinniest horse in the history of cinema, listen to the full episode.

When Democrat Doug Jones won Alabama’s hotly contested Senate special election on Tuesday night, observers on Twitter were quick to point one thing out: Jones’s victory was most likely due to high black turnout, particularly among black women.

Despite fears of the reduced turnout often seen in an off-cycle elections, belief that the Jones campaign made missteps in its black outreach, and concerns that voter suppression tactics in the state could reduce the number of black voters able to cast ballots, black voters made a commanding display of political power on Tuesday night, according to preliminary exit polls. In a state where African Americans usually make up one-fourth of the electorate, the initial exit polls suggested that they exceeded that turnout rate, with early numbers putting them at 30 percent of Tuesday’s electorate.

Observers noted that the result was a powerful reminder of the power of black women’s votes. The results also come months after the Democratic Party engaged in a highly public debate about the significance of “identity politics,” with some arguing that the party was taking black women for granted as it pursued the votes of working-class white voters.

On Wednesday, Democratic National Committee Chairman Tom Perez, noted that the election was further evidence of black women being “the backbone of the Democratic Party.”

Let me be clear: We won in Alabama and Virginia because #BlackWomen led us to victory. Black women are the backbone of the Democratic Party, and we can’t take that for granted. Period.

Alabama’s Senate race isn’t the first election this year where a strong turnout among black voters, led by black women, helped determine an election. In a performance that closely matched their 2013 behavior in the state, black women in Virginia helped keep the governor’s mansion in Democratic hands, with 91 percent of their vote going to Ralph Northam last month. They also showed the strongest support for the winning Democratic gubernatorial candidate in New Jersey. And while Hillary Clinton did not win the 2016 election, black women overwhelmingly supported her, backing her by a 94-6 margin over Donald Trump and other candidates.

On social media last night, some observers noted that black women were voting for Doug Jones in an effort to “save America,” which some critics argued puts too much of a burden on black women.

This narrative about Black voters "saving" Alabama would imply that majority of white voters--the majority of people in the state--wanted to be "saved" from Moore. They didn't. Black voters protected themselves

But in a state where a disproportionate level ofAfrican-Americans face rampant poverty, poor education systems, and unequal access to healthcare, the votes of black women weren’t about some altruistic mission to save America from itself. Their votes were a very real attempt to make a change that would help themselves and their families.

They were also counteractinga candidate who argued that America was last “great” when slavery was in place, responded affirmatively when asked if constitutional amendments after the 10th should be abolished, and was backed by a president who has engaged in vitriolic attacks against prominent black women while pursuing legislation that would harm them. The results outline why they were such a powerful political force that should be focused on beyond election season.

Black women are not political mules to be used every time a mediocre white candidate needs to win. No amount of verbal appreciation will do us justice. Turn over the money, resources and power, then we can talk.

Can you imagine what would be possible if the DNC and political funders actually turned over resources and support to Black organizers, Black politicos, and Black woman leaders? We can vote. We can also lead, change, and transform nations. Invest in black people.

Alabama’s Senate race is only the latest election in which black women made the difference. If their high levels of turnout remain surprising, it’s because we aren’t looking to them in the first place.

Doug Jones’s victory over Roy Moore Tuesday night in Alabama’s special election for US Senate was enough of a shock that most political pundits didn’t have ready-made explanations for why it happened. So in the aftermath, they’re poring over what little data they have to determine which groups of voters helped push Jones over the top by showing up to vote for him, and who hurt Moore worst by staying home.

The easiest way to draw these conclusions is to look at the exit polls conducted while Alabamians were voting. The exit polls are, in some ways, more detailed than the official voting tallies. And because they break down votes by demographic groups, they can often present ready-made narratives — like the idea in Alabama that black voters, and especially black women (who made up 18 percent of the electorate but voted 97 percent to 3 percent for Jones) “saved” the election for the Democratic Party.

One huge problem with interpretations based on exit polls in the Alabama special election is that pollsters simply didn’t conduct exit polls in the state in 2016, so it’s difficult to say how much of what happened in the state is due to, say, energized black turnout versus depressed white turnout.

Exit polls can be useful. But there’s also good reason to be a little skeptical of using them to interpret a vote after the fact — because that’s not what they’re designed to do. Here’s what you need to know.

How the exit poll works

Every November election — and during particularly important special elections, like Tuesday’s Senate election in Alabama — exit polls are conducted by a group of media outlets called the National Election Pool: NBC, CBS, ABC, Fox, CNN, and the Associated Press. They hire a pollster to conduct the exit poll, but they're the ones that own the information — and that get to be the first to report the results.

That is the key to the exit poll. It is designed to allow the media to know as quickly as possible who has won the election. That means that when designing the poll, pollsters don’t focus on collecting as much data as possible — they focus on collecting the smallest amount of data that’s still going to reliably predict who has gotten more votes.

In a national election, that means that safe red or blue states (like Alabama) don’t get the full attention of exit pollsters. Exit pollsters still send people to do interviews there, for the purpose of the national poll, but they don’t collect enough interviews to publish reliable poll results.

So in addition to all the other factors that made the Senate special election so hard for pollsters to predict, the exit poll had the added factor of working in a state that it hadn’t held operations in for several years. That’s one good reason to be skeptical that it perfectly captured the state of the electorate.

The actual polling happens in two parts.

The most visible part of the poll happens in person on Election Day. An army of thousands of interviewers are sent to hundreds of polling places around the country. Interviewers approach a certain number of voters who are leaving the polling place — the exact fraction surveyed is secret — and ask them to fill out the written exit poll survey. In 2016, pollsters estimated they’d interview about 85,000 people on Election Day around the country — obviously, the number in Alabama in 2017 would be much smaller.

But part of the exit poll has already happened before Election Day. As early voting has become more popular, it's gotten harder to predict vote totals just by talking to people who vote on Election Day. So for the past several elections, exit pollsters have started calling people and asking if they voted early or absentee, and then conducting exit poll interviews by phone. (In 2016, pollsters estimated they’d contact about 16,000 voters this way.)

What the exit poll can — and can’t — tell us

The exit poll isn’t just about whom people voted for — that’s why there are interviewers even in safe states. Voters are asked to provide basic demographic information like gender, age, and ethnicity. Furthermore, they're asked some questions about their personal viewpoints and behaviors — like their religion and churchgoing habits — and questions about major issues facing the country.

That means the exit poll data is actually more detailed, in some ways, than the official US Census vote tallies that come out several weeks after the election. It can offer the first hints — and often the most important ones — to what voters thought this election was about. That's very important to pundits as they try to interpret what it means.

In 2004, for example, post-election chatter focused on "values voters." Voters who attended religious services regularly had overwhelmingly voted for George W. Bush. That narrative came out of the exit poll data.

Of course, what voters say is important to them is partly what campaigns have told voters is important. There's political science research suggesting that when a campaign hammers particular issues, those are the issues that the candidate's supporters say are most important to them. But the exit poll is still the best opportunity the national media has, in some ways, to figure out who voted, why, and how.

That said, there are some big questions about using the exit poll to draw sweeping conclusions. The first problem is that the exit poll only covers people who actually voted — meaning that it can obscure turnout problems on one side or the other.

In Alabama, for example, the exit poll showed that white voters overwhelmingly supported Roy Moore — but without more information about how many white voters stayed home because they were unwilling to support Moore, it’s hard to draw a conclusion about the role white voters played in the election.

For the most part, though, the exit poll is a lot more reliable when it comes to white voters than when it comes to nonwhite voters. And this is where it becomes really important to understand the exit poll’s limitations when talking about Doug Jones’s election.

The exit polls’ blind spots make it hard for them to analyze voters of color

There are some particular challenges that exit polls have faced for the past several elections that they still haven't found a way to work out. And as it happens, those challenges tend to involve voters of color.

Early voters. The phone poll for early voters is a relatively new addition to the exit poll— and it’s still a relatively minor one, compared with in-person polling. Early voting itself, meanwhile, has gotten very popular very quickly. In key states like Nevada and Florida, it’s estimated that fewer people will show up to vote on Election Day than showed up during early voting.

The exit poll understands the huge role early voters will play — pollsters estimated to Pew that 35 to 40 percent of all voting would happen early in 2016 — but it’s not clear that their polling can accurately capture who those people are. It runs into the problems any phone poll has — namely, that it's difficult to poll people who only have mobile phones.

No exit pollster here!

Networks can work around the early-voting blind spot when they’re using the exit poll for its intended purpose — which is, again, calling the race accurately as soon as possible. In areas where they know early voting has been heavy, they can delay calling close races even if the exit poll suggests one candidate will win. But the demographic and other data the exit poll provides might be skewed in favor of people who voted in person — who might not be the voters who decided this election.

Small groups. Like any poll, the smaller a sample size is, the less likely it is to be representative. So the exit poll is pretty reliable when it comes to large demographics (men, women, Democrats, Republicans) but less reliable when it gets to small demographics (young voters, Jewish voters).

Voters of color. In addition to the general problems with smaller voting demographics, analysts believe the exit poll has a tendency to oversample a particular kind of voter of color — the kind who lives in majority-white areas.

Here's the logic. Even though the public doesn't know exactly how the exit poll chooses where to go, it's possible to make some educated guesses. The exit poll is trying to predict the margin of victory for one candidate over another across the state. So when it decides which polling places to put interviewers outside of, it's reasonable to assume that it's choosing lots of swing precincts — precincts that are harder to predict and likely to affect the outcome. Those are going to be largely white precincts.

Alternatively, says Matt Barreto of Latino Decisions, exit pollsters might choose a precinct as a benchmark based on the previous cycle. For example, if a precinct voted for the Democratic senator 70 percent to 30 percent in 2008, the pollster might choose to put an exit poll interviewer at that precinct to see if the Democrat is getting less than 70 percent of the vote this time around. But pollsters are not necessarily paying attention to the racial makeup of those precincts.

Here's why this is a problem: The voters of color that pollsters run into in majority-white precincts might not be representative of the voters of color across the state. In particular, according to Latino Decisions, voters of color living among whites are "more assimilated, better educated, higher income, and more conservative than other minority voters."

Check out the difference in the percentage of nonwhite voters who had a college degree in 2010, according to the US Census versus the exit poll:

Latino Decisions

(The problem is even worse for Latino voters, because exit polls are almost never offered in Spanish — even though more than a quarter of Latino voters prefer Spanish to English. So the exit polls oversample English-speaking Latinos.)

When it comes to the Alabama election, it certainly doesn’t look like the exit pollsters overstated the conservatism of black voters. But they might have made incorrect assumptions about what share of the electorate black men and black women made up, based on where they saw black voters at the polls. Conversely, it’s possible that they overstated the conservatism of certain white groups — like white voters without college degrees — because they were polling in more affluent “swing” areas, where such voters would be more conservative.

Any errors the exit poll made were probably on the margins. It is almost certainly still the case that white voters strongly supported Moore and black voters overwhelmingly supported Jones. But the bigger conclusions one tries to draw from a single race, the more important it is to recognize the limitations of what we know about what actually happened there.

On October 5, the New York Times published an exposé alleging that Harvey Weinstein, one of Hollywood’s most revered moguls and influential kingpins, has been sexually harassing and abusing women for nearly 30 years. On October 10, the New Yorker followed with another extensive report, including several graphic, on-the-record accounts from more of Weinstein’s alleged victims. Just a couple of hours later, the Times followed up its own report with yet more public accounts, including from industry stalwarts Gwyneth Paltrow and Angelina Jolie.

Together, the allegations indicate that Weinstein may have abused his power on a variety of fronts over decades, and identifya pattern of behavior in which Weinstein often invited women to hotels for “business meetings,” only to make sexual advances against their will. Most of the women Weinstein allegedly targeted were young and had little institutional power, and they say they were afraid to speak out afterward for fear that he would ruin their careers.

Comprising both specific incidents of assault and ongoing harassment and suggestive behavior, the list of women accusing Weinstein is long — and as more women speak up, it’s likely to get longer. Here are all the women who have so far gone on record alleging that Weinstein sexually harassed and abused them, presented alphabetically. Please be advised that the details below include explicit and disturbing accounts of sexual assault.

This list will be updated as necessary. The most recent addition to the list is Salma Hayek.

He behaved inappropriately and propositioned a “personal” relationship to further my career whilst bragging about other actresses he had “helped” in a similar way. He told me not to tell anyone I was alone with him, told me if I did it might affect my “opportunities.” He tried to take my hand and put it on his lap which is when I managed to leave the room. [Amber Anderson / Instagram]

"I was in my dressing gown and I answered the door to find Harvey standing there," she said.

"He pushed me inside and rammed me up against the coat rack in my tiny hall and started fumbling at my gown. He was trying to kiss me and shove inside me. It was disgusting."

She said she tried to push him away but was unable to as he was too heavy.

"Finally I just gave up. At least I was able to stop him kissing me. As he ground himself against me, I kept my eyes shut tight, held my breath, just let him get on with it. He came over my leg like a dog and then left. It was pathetic, revolting. I remember lying in the bath later and crying." [CNN]

First at the Hôtel du Cap-Eden-Roc in France in 1997, and then multiple times through 1999:

At first, Weinstein was solicitous, praising her work. Then he left the room. When he returned, he was wearing a bathrobe and holding a bottle of lotion. “He asks me to give a massage. I was, like, ‘Look man, I am no fucking fool,’” Argento said. “But, looking back, I am a fucking fool. And I am still trying to come to grips with what happened.”

Argento said that, after she reluctantly agreed to give Weinstein a massage, he pulled her skirt up, forced her legs apart, and performed oral sex on her as she repeatedly told him to stop. Weinstein “terrified me, and he was so big,” she said. “It wouldn’t stop. It was a nightmare.” [New Yorker]

Arquette recalled that, when she arrived at the room, Weinstein opened the door wearing a white bathrobe. Weinstein said that his neck was sore and that he needed a massage. She told him that she could recommend a good masseuse. “Then he grabbed my hand,” she said. He put it on his neck. When she yanked her hand away, she told me, Weinstein grabbed it again and pulled it toward his penis, which was visible and erect. “My heart was really racing. I was in a fight-or-flight moment,” she said. She told Weinstein, “I will never do that.” [New Yorker]

Weinstein invited her to a business meeting at the Peninsula. When she arrived, he asked her over the phone to come up to his room. ... Barth said that, in the conversation that followed, he alternated between offering to cast her in a film and demanding a naked massage in bed. “So, what would happen if, say, we’re having some champagne and I take my clothes off and you give me a massage?” she recalled him asking. “And I’m, like, ‘That’s not going to happen.’ ”

When she moved toward the door to leave, Weinstein lashed out, saying that she needed to lose weight “to compete with Mila Kunis,” and then, apparently in an effort to mollify her, promising a meeting with one of his female executives. “He gave me her number, and I walked out and I started bawling.” [New Yorker]

I was called to meet Harvey Weinstein at the Savoy Hotel when I was 17. I assumed it would be in a conference room which was very common. When I arrived, reception told me to go to his room . He opened the door in his bathrobe. I was incredibly naive and young and it did not cross my mind that this older, unattractive man would expect me to have any sexual interest in him. After declining alcohol and announcing that I had school in the morning I left, uneasy but unscathed. A few years later he asked me if he had tried anything with me in that first meeting. I realized he couldn't remember if he had assaulted me or not. [Kate Beckinsale / Instagram]

Juls Bindi (massage therapist)

At Weinstein’s suite at Los Angeles’s Montage Hotel in 2010:

“He cut the massage short. He gets up, and he just says, ‘How big is my penis?’ I was like, ‘Excuse me?’

“He follows me into the bathroom. He shuts the door behind him.”

Then, Bindi says, he proceeds to pleasure himself.

“I’m like, ‘This is not appropriate, I don’t feel comfortable with this, no, this is not okay, do not do this in front of me.’ He grabbed me and starting groping my chest, and I pushed him away. I was stunned! What do you do in a situation like that? You have this guy who’s overpowering you. What can you do? He said, ‘Do you want a book deal or not?’” [ABC News]

Harvey left the room, but not for long. He re-emerged naked a couple of minutes later and asked if I would give him a massage. Panicking, in shock, I remember weighing up the options and wondering how much I needed to placate him to keep myself safe. He asked if I would like a massage instead, and for a second I thought this might be a way to give him an inch without him taking a mile.

I told him I was uncomfortable and that I was angry that I had been tricked into this position. He pleaded with me to let him massage me and I let him put his hands on my shoulders while my mind raced. [Medium]

For 40 years, Cynthia Burr has almost never talked about the time she met Mr. Weinstein.

But she didn’t forget how he greeted her in the lobby of a beautiful old building in New York City. How he tried to kiss her in the elevator. And how, she said, he unzipped his fly and forced her to perform oral sex on him in a hallway.

“It was just him and me alone,” she said. “I was fearful I didn’t have the wherewithal to get away.” [NYT]

“He sat down, chatted for a few minutes and then excused himself and left the room through a far door, where I could see a short passage that connected to the bedroom and the bathroom. I assumed he had gone for a pee,” she said. “I could hear him moving around and suddenly the sound of bath taps running. ‘What do you say we both jump in the bath?’ he hollered. I could hear the thump of shoes being taken off and felt shocked that the meeting had turned sleazy.” [People]

He told me that he has a lot of 'special friends' and they give each other massages. It was a full court press. He wanted me to be one of his 'special friends' and go into the bedroom. I told him that I had a serious boyfriend and reminded him that he was married and that we should keep this professional. I was so blindsided. Not one ounce of me anticipated it. It was the weirdest meeting I've ever had in my life. [Hollywood Reporter]

He started to tell me that he found me very attractive and wanted to have relations with me. I told him I was very in love with my companion. He replied that didn’t bother him at all and offered to have me be his mistress a few days a year. That way we could continue to work together. Basically, it was, ‘If you want to continue in America, you have to go through me.’ [Le Parisien]

As they got to his room, she received a telephone call from one of her colleagues, and Weinstein disappeared into a bathroom, leaving the door open. She assumed that he was washing his hands.

“When I hung up the phone, I heard the shower go on in the bathroom,” she said. “I was, like, What the fuck, is he taking a shower?” Weinstein came out, naked and with an erection. “What are you doing?” she asked. Weinstein demanded that she lie on the bed and told her that many other women had done so before her. [New Yorker]

When I first started to work as an actress, i was working on a film and I received a call from‎ Harvey Weinstein asking if I had slept with any of the women I was seen out with in the media. It was a very odd and uncomfortable call ...

... A year or two later, I went to a meeting with him in the lobby of a hotel with a director about an upcoming film. The director left the meeting and Harvey asked me to stay and chat with him ... He then invited me to his room. I quickly declined and asked his assistant if my car was outside. She said it wasn't and wouldn't be for a bit and I should go to his room. At that moment I felt very powerless and scared but didn't want to act that way hoping that I was wrong about the situation. When I arrived I was relieved to find another woman in his room and thought immediately I was safe. He asked us to kiss and she began some sort of advances upon his direction. I swiftly got up and asked him if he knew that I could sing. And I began to sing. I thought it would make the situation better, more professional, like an audition. [Cara Delevingne / Instagram]

As soon as I was in there, I realised it was a terrible mistake. I got to the hotel room, I remember talk of a massage and I thought that was pretty gross. I think he showed me his big back and I found that pretty horrid.

Then before I knew it, he started trying to pull my clothes off and pin me down and I just kept saying, “No, no, no.” But he was really forceful. I remember him pulling at my trousers and stuff and looming over me and I just sort of – I am a big, strong girl and I bolted … ran for the bathroom and locked the door.

I was in there for a while, I think. He went very quiet. After a while I remember opening the door and seeing him just there facing the door, masturbating, so I quickly closed the door again and locked it. Then when I heard room service come to the door, I just ran. [The Guardian]

They were introduced through a mutual friend, in a casual and platonic setting, and she accepted his invitation to dine with him at the Peninsula. Esco viewed it as a chance to talk with a mentor about film craft. But toward the end of dinner, she said, Weinstein told her: “I think we should see a movie in the theater, like back in the day, and we should kiss.”

She brushed him off by saying she didn’t date older guys, but she said he pressed on — “It’s just a kiss” — and kept pressing.

“He tried to insinuate that everything would be easier for me if I went along,” Esco remembered. [Washington Post]

“Oddly, despite having heard endless stories about massages and hand-jobs in hotel rooms, it doesn’t even cross my mind — not for a second — that he might try the same on me,” she says. Weinstein complimented Gruffudd’s recent audition for one of his projects, then asked Evans to accompany him to the hotel bathroom. “Just go. I’m right behind you. I want to touch your tits. Kiss you a little,” he allegedly said. When Evans begged off, Weinstein told her, “Let’s hope it all works out for your boyfriend.” [Vulture]

Lucia Evans (former aspiring actress)

At Miramax’s New York City office in 2004:

In the meeting, Evans recalled, “he immediately was simultaneously flattering me and demeaning me and making me feel bad about myself.” Weinstein told her that she’d “be great in ‘Project Runway’ ” — the show, which Weinstein helped produce, premièred later that year — but only if she lost weight. He also told her about two scripts, a horror movie and a teen love story, and said one of his associates would discuss them with her.

“At that point, after that, is when he assaulted me,” Evans said. “He forced me to perform oral sex on him.” As she objected, Weinstein took his penis out of his pants and pulled her head down onto it. “I said, over and over, ‘I don’t want to do this, stop, don’t,’ ” she said. “I tried to get away, but maybe I didn’t try hard enough. I didn’t want to kick him or fight him.” In the end, she said, “He’s a big guy. He overpowered me.” [New Yorker]

"I had just arrived and I was sleeping, I was in my bed," she began. "I wake up and Harvey is standing above my bed. That alone is frightening."

She continued, "All of the sudden he takes his pants down and starts doing his stuff. He's blocking the door. I can't get out and he — I don't know how to say this on the radio, but he finishes on the carpet of the floor." [THR]

When they got to the Park Lane Hotel, Mr. Weinstein went to the check-in desk while she waited elsewhere in the lobby, Ms. Exiner d’Amore recalled. He returned and said there had been a mistake with the reservations; there was only one room. They would have to share.

“I gave him a look like that was ridiculous,” she recalled. But she ultimately agreed, assuming it was harmless. When she got into bed that night, she said, he slipped in next to her, naked.

“I told him no. I kept pushing him away. He just wouldn’t listen,” Ms. Exiner d’Amore said. “He just forced himself on me.” She said he forcibly performed oral sex and intercourse on her. [NYT]

You see, nothing happened to me with Harvey, [and] by that I mean, I escaped 5 times. I had two Peninsula hotel meetings in the evening with Harvey and all I remember was that I ducked, dived, and ultimately got out of there without getting slobbered over — well, just a bit. Yes, massage was suggested ... I remember him telling me all the actresses who had slept with him and what he had done for them. I wasn’t drinking the [Kool] Aid. I knew Harvey was a master manipulator. [Twitter]

“Like every other woman in the industry, I’ve had an ‘audition’ with Harvey Weinstein, where I’d actually already had the audition but you had to be personally approved by him,” said Garai. “So I had to go to his hotel room in the Savoy, and he answered the door in his bathrobe. I was only 18. I felt violated by it, it has stayed very clearly in my memory.” [The Guardian]

We went to his office and had a great conversation about his current film and about the film I was pitching. He seemed genuinely interested in the script I had co-written. After 30 minutes he excused himself to go to the bathroom.

He returned in a robe with the front open, buck-naked. He told me to keep talking about my film and that he was going to get into his hot tub which was in the room adjacent to his office, steps away. I kept talking as he got into the hot tub. When I finished my pitch, he asked me to watch him masturbate. I told him I was leaving. He quickly got out of the hot tub. As I went to get my purse to leave, he grabbed my forearm and pulled me to his bathroom and pleaded with me to watch him masturbate. My heart was racing and I was very scared. [Variety]

The details of what I have learned was not unique to me are out there now — the office tour that became an occasion to trap me in an empty meeting room, the begging for a massage, his hands on my shoulders as I attempted to beat a retreat … all while not wanting to alienate the most powerful man in Hollywood. [ACEs Connection]

At a breakfast meeting at the Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc, during the Cannes Film Festival in 1996:

Upstairs, he asked to give her a massage, Ms. Godrèche said. She said no. He argued that casual massages were an American custom — he gave them to his secretary all the time, Ms. Godrèche recalled him saying.

“The next thing I know, he’s pressing against me and pulling off my sweater,” she said. She pulled away and left the suite. [NYT]

Trish Goff (model)

At the Tribeca Grill in 2003:

Then he started asking me if I had a boyfriend, and if we had an open relationship. I said I wasn’t interested in an open relationship, but he was relentless, and I kept trying to shut that down and move on. Then he started putting his hands on my legs, and I said, “Can you stop doing that?” When we finally stood up to go, he really started groping me, grabbing my breasts, grabbing my face and trying to kiss me. I kept saying, “Please stop, please stop,” but he didn’t until I managed to get back into the public space. [NYT]

Weinstein was on his bed, saying he had a headache, she said. He asked her to lie down with him and asked her to take her shirt off so he could see her breasts, Gomes said. She left the room, and he followed in a bathrobe and started massaging her shoulders and neck despite her saying she didn’t want it, Gomes said.

“He would not stop. He just kept pushing his hands close to my chest forcefully until I finally was able to get up and away from him,” she wrote.

Weinstein told her, “You know, Gwyneth Paltrow and Ashley Judd were exactly where you are at one point. Look at them now,” Gomes recounted.

Gomes said she made an excuse to leave at that point, and Weinstein, at the door, grabbed her and tried to kiss her on the lips. She said she turned her head, and he sneered. She never saw or spoke to him again. [LAT]

There was a pile of scripts sitting on his desk. “I want to put you in one of my movies,” he said and offered to let me choose which one I liked best. Later in the conversation, he mentioned that he had an agreement with his wife. He could sleep with whomever he wanted when he was out of town. I walked out of the meeting feeling uneasy. There was no explicit mention that to star in one of those films I had to sleep with him, but the subtext was there.

A few weeks later, I was asked to do a follow-up meeting at his hotel. I called one of my actress friends to explain my discomfort with the situation, and she offered to come with me. En route, she called me to say she couldn’t make it. Not wanting to be at the hotel alone with him, I made up an excuse — I had an early morning and would have to postpone. Harvey told me that my actress friend was already at his hotel and that both of them would be very disappointed if I didn’t show. I knew he was lying, so I politely and apologetically reiterated that I could no longer come by. [Variety]

I met him for a business meeting in Paris at which he behaved inappropriately and I had to push him off. I got away without it going further, but the experience left me shocked and disgusted. [Eva Green/Twitter]

Ambra Battilana Gutierrez (model)

At Miramax’s New York City office:

In the office, she sat with Weinstein on a couch to review the portfolio, and he began staring at her breasts, asking if they were real. Gutierrez later told officers of the New York Police Department Special Victims Division that Weinstein then lunged at her, groping her breasts and attempting to put a hand up her skirt while she protested. He finally backed off and told her that his assistant would give her tickets to “Finding Neverland,” a Broadway musical that he was producing. He said that he would meet her at the show that evening.

Instead of going to the show that night, Gutierrez went to the nearest N.Y.P.D. precinct station and reported the assault. Weinstein telephoned her later that evening, annoyed that she had failed to appear at the show. [New Yorker]

In the “early aughts” at the Hôtel du Cap-Eden-Roc, and again “several years later”:

He called her over, and told her that he loved her work. Then he asked for her room number so that he could call her to schedule a meeting.

“That seemed pretty normal to me, you know, how people talk in business, and I didn’t know his reputation or anything,” Hannah said. She was in her room, already in her pajamas and getting ready for bed, when the phone calls started ... Though she didn’t pick up, she guessed that it was Weinstein. “And then, shortly thereafter, the knocking on the door began,” she told me. “It was sort of incessant, and then it started turning into pounding on my door,” she said. She was certain that it was Weinstein—as she recalls, she saw him through the peephole in the door. The pounding became so frightening that Hannah, who was staying on the ground floor, left her room via an exterior door. She spent the night in her makeup artist’s room.

The following evening, Hannah was in her room with the makeup artist, packing her things ahead of their departure the next morning, when the pounding on the door began again. “The knocking started again and again. And I was like, ‘oh shit,’ ” Hannah recalled. “We actually pushed a dresser in front of the door and just kind of huddled in the room.” [New Yorker, 10/27]

Mimi Haleyi (former production assistant):

At Weinstein’s New York City apartment in 2006:

She was escorted up to his apartment and it was not long before she says he was "all over me making sexual advances." She continued, "I told him 'no, no no,' but he insisted."

Haleyi says she then told him she was on her period and that there was "no way" anything was going to happen. "Please stop," she recalls saying.

"He wouldn't take no for an answer and backed me into a room which was not lit, but looked like a kid's bedroom with drawings on the walls," she said. "He held me down on the bed, I tried to get him off of me but it was impossible. He was extremely persistent and physically overpowering."

She continued, "He then orally forced himself on me while I was on my period. He even pulled my tampon out. I was in disbelief. I would not have wanted anyone to do that with me even if the person had been a romantic partner." [THR]

No to opening the door to him at all hours of the night, hotel after hotel, location after location, where he would show up unexpectedly, including one location where I was doing a movie he wasn’t even involved with. [NYT]

He asked me to meet for breakfast. We ate breakfast, we talked about films, film making. He asked me a few questions about the state of my love life. I shifted the conversation back to something less personal. Then he went to the loo. He came back and said, let’s go up to the room, I want to give you a script. We walked to the lift and the energy shifted ... I said to Harvey, I’m not interested in anything other than work, please don’t think I got in here with you for any other reason ...

He was silent after I spoke, furious. We got out of the lift and walked to his room. His hand was on my back, he was marching me forward ... he tried his key card and it didn’t work, then he got really angry. He walked me back ... he paid for my car and whispered in my ear, Don’t tell anyone about this, not your manager, not your agent. I got into my car and cried. [Lena Headey / Twitter]

According to Holly, Weinstein left the shower, dried off, and began approaching her while still naked.

“The adrenaline rush I felt, I wanted to flee, I was scared. He told me that I looked stressed and he thought maybe I could use a massage, maybe I could give him a massage. I began just sort of babbling like I was a child, I think it was just the fear.” She told him she didn’t have a massage license and that maybe they could call the front desk to have a masseuse come up.

Holly said Weinstein began to threaten her, stating that she needed to “keep him as [her] ally” and that it would be a “bad decision” if she left the room. At that point, Holly said, she “pushed him and ran.” [Variety]

Paz de la Huerta (actress)

In 2010, at de la Huerta’s apartment:

Actress Paz de la Huerta says that in October of 2010, Weinstein offered to give her a ride home to her New York City apartment, after a party, because the two lived in the same neighborhood.

She says Weinstein insisted they have drinks. The pair eventually ended up inside her apartment.

That's when she alleges Weinstein took off her dress and forced himself on her. [CBS]

At Weinstein’s suite at the Peninsula hotel in Beverly Hills in November 2010:

She says she was there to discuss her career, but that Weinstein quickly insisted that she give him a massage. She initially refused, but he was relentless and she ultimately agreed. Weinstein then suggested that he perform oral sex on her, the lawsuit states.

“Again, Weinstein displayed persistence and would not take ‘no’ for an answer,” according to the suit. “Weinstein initiated and Plaintiff froze as Weinstein removed her clothing and performed oral sex on her. Weinstein performed oral sex on Plaintiff for several minutes. After performing oral sex on Plaintiff, Weinstein masturbated in front of Plaintiff until he reached orgasm.” [Variety]

“I had a bad experience with Harvey Weinstein in my youth, and as a result, chose never to work with him again and warn others when they did,” Ms. Jolie said in an email. “This behavior towards women in any field, any country is unacceptable.” [NYT]

At a breakfast meeting in Weinstein’s Peninsula Beverly Hills hotel suite in the late 1990s:

Mr. Weinstein soon issued invitation after invitation, she said. Could he give her a massage? When she refused, he suggested a shoulder rub. She rejected that too, she recalled. He steered her toward a closet, asking her to help pick out his clothing for the day, and then toward the bathroom. Would she watch him take a shower? she remembered him saying.

“I said no, a lot of ways, a lot of times, and he always came back at me with some new ask,” Ms. Judd said. “It was all this bargaining, this coercive bargaining.” [NYT]

I met Harvey at an industry party. The following day, my agent said he wanted to see me for a general meeting. The location was set for his hotel room. I wasn’t comfortable with going to his room & said so. The following day, we sat down with an assistant in the hotel restaurant. He bullshit me for 5 minutes re: movies he could put me in, then asked the assistant to excuse us. As she walked away, he said, "I know you were feeling what I was feeling when we met the other night” and then regaled me with offers of a lavish life filled with trips around the world on private planes etc. IF I would be his girlfriend. Or, “We could just keep this professional.” All I knew was not to offend this very powerful man and to get out of the situation as quickly as possible. [Minka Kelly / Instagram]

He went to the bathroom, came back in a robe and asked her to give him a massage, she said. “Everybody does it,” he said, according to Ms. Kendall, and mentioned a famous model’s name. She refused; he left the room, and returned nude, she said.

“He literally chased me,” she said. “He wouldn’t let me pass him to get to the door.”

Ms. Kendall said his advances had a bargaining quality: He asked if she would at least show her breasts, if nothing else.

Heather Kerr (former actress)

At a private meeting, year and place undisclosed:

“He asked me if I was good," said Kerr. "I started to tell him about my training and acting experience and he said, ‘No. I need to know if you’re good.’ He said if he was going to introduce me around town he needed to know if I was 'good.' He kept repeating that word. I offered to provide him with a reel. He had this sleazy smile on his face. Because he was sitting so close on this couch I started to get a sick feeling in my stomach. The next thing I knew he unzipped his pants and pulled out his penis.” [THR]

I could waste this precious space on Harvey Weinstein by describing my own ordeal with him. An ordeal in a hotel room where he attempted to treat me like chattel that could be purchased with the promise of work in exchange for being his disposable orifice. But I'm not giving that man, a newly crowned figurehead of sexual abuse, the privilege of more ink. [Globe and Mail]

Laura Madden (former Weinstein Company production assistant)

At hotels in Dublin and Ireland, starting in 1991:

Laura Madden, a former employee who said Mr. Weinstein prodded her for massages … said he had a way of making anyone who objected feel like an outlier. “It was so manipulative,” she said in an interview. “You constantly question yourself — am I the one who is the problem?” [NYT]

Malthe said Weinstein barged into the room, took off his pants and sat on her bed. “He said that he could give me a part in an upcoming film, with the implication being that I had to sleep with him in order to get it,” she said.

Malthe said that after she told him she was not interested, Weinstein pushed her back and forced her to have sexual intercourse with him. “I laid still and closed my eyes and just wanted it to end,” she said. “I was like a dead person. Afterwards I lay there in complete disgust. After he was done he put his pants back on and hurriedly left the room.” [LA Times]

I, too, went to the meeting thinking that perhaps my entire life was about to change for the better. I, too, was asked to meet him in a hotel bar. I, too, met a young, female assistant there who said the meeting had been moved upstairs to his suite because he was a very busy man. I, too, felt my guard go up but was calmed by the presence of another woman my age beside me. I, too, felt terror in the pit of my stomach when that young woman left the room and I was suddenly alone with him. I, too, was asked if I wanted a massage, champagne, strawberries. I, too, sat in that chair paralyzed by mounting fear when he suggested we shower together. What could I do? How not to offend this man, this gatekeeper, who could anoint or destroy me?

It was clear that there was only one direction he wanted this encounter to go in, and that was sex or some version of an erotic exchange. I was able to gather myself together—a bundle of firing nerves, hands trembling, voice lost in my throat—and leave the room. [Atlantic]

When she got up to go, expecting a handshake, Masse said Weinstein instead grabbed her and “gave me this really tight, close hug that lasted for quite a long period of time. He was still in his underwear. Then he told me he loved me. I left right after that.” Masse said she left feeling uncomfortable, but since it was her first time meeting someone so powerful in the industry, she didn’t know how executives in the entertainment business typically conducted themselves. “I thought, ‘Gosh, maybe this is just how they treat everyone… Maybe it’s just that Hollywood schmooze thing.’ But I just didn’t feel right about it.” [Variety]

Ashley Matthau (dancer)

At Weinstein’s hotel room in Puerto Rico in 2004:

She said they went to his hotel room, where talk quickly became sexual: Mr. Weinstein told her that he had helped launch the careers of high-profile actresses who had slept with him, and that she should consider doing the same. When she declined, Mr. Weinstein pushed her onto the bed and fondled her breasts, she said. He then stripped, straddled her and masturbated on top of her.

“I kept telling him, ‘Stop, I’m engaged,’ but he kept saying: ‘It’s just a little cuddling. It’s not a problem. It’s not like we’re having sex.’” [NYT]

In 1997, Mr. Weinstein reached a previously undisclosed settlement with Rose McGowan, then a 23-year-old-actress. … The $100,000 settlement was “not to be construed as an admission” by Mr. Weinstein, but intended to “avoid litigation and buy peace,” according to the legal document, which was reviewed by The Times. [NYT]

“I might have told Mr W mid-script ‘meeting’ after he sent his assistant out that I’d punch him if he didn’t take his hands off me,” she wrote.

“Shook all the way home but high-fived myself for knowing my self worth in my early 20s.

“I knew my first film would be my last after that and I was more than OK about it.” [Variety]

Katya Mtsitouridze (Russian TV hostess)

At a hotel room in Venice in 2004:

Knowing that many movie companies and press people stayed at the hotel, she chose a public placed for the meeting. When she turned up the next day she was greeted by an assistant who said Weinstein was feeling unwell and suggested she join him for lunch in his room upstairs.

"The assistant said that he would be joining us, so I went up," Katya says. But when she walked into the room she noticed the "table was set for two" and that the "assistant instantly disappeared."

The shock of what happened next is still with Mtsitouridze 13 years later: "I was frozen into immobility like a statue, because a well-known producer with whom I've come to discuss modern Russian writers, was in a bathrobe."

What is now a familiar approach unfolded, echoed in the testimonies of dozens of women recently. Weinstein looked at Mtsitouridze and told her: "I waited for the masseuse, but she's late, we can have fun without her… let's relax." [THR]

Emily Nestor (former front-desk assistant at the Weinstein Company)

At the Peninsula Beverly Hills hotel:

“He said, ‘You know, we could have a lot of fun,’ ” Nestor recalled. “I could put you in my London office, and you could work there and you could be my girlfriend.” She declined. He asked to hold her hand; she said no. In Nestor’s account of the exchange, Weinstein said, “Oh, the girls always say no. You know, ‘No, no.’ And then they have a beer or two and then they’re throwing themselves at me.” In a tone that Nestor described as “very weirdly proud,” Weinstein added “that he’d never had to do anything like Bill Cosby.” She assumed that he meant he’d never drugged a woman. “It’s just a bizarre thing to be so proud of,” she said. “That you’ve never had to resort to doing that. It was just so far removed from reality and normal rules of consent.” [New Yorker]

As I add my name to the rapidly expanding list of women whom Harvey Weinstein has harassed, I feel a strong wish to clarify just how well-known Harvey’s actions were in our community throughout his reign as one of the most powerful players in the industry. I worked on the Harvey Weinstein-produced “The Great Raid,” where I warned a young co-star not to take Harvey up on his invitations to drinks unless the whole group was there. I had no issues on the film, nor when I met Harvey at social events around the world.

It was therefore a real shock when Harvey proceeded to put his hand on my thigh at dinner during the opening night of “Great Raid,” at which both my boyfriend and my brother were present. I grabbed his hand and squeezed it violently to hurt him and proceeded to hold it in place on his own thigh. I steered clear of him as soon as I could for the rest of the evening but soon forgot about it, until the New York Times and New Yorker pieces set off a landslide. [Variety]

Kadian Noble alleges that Weinstein invited her to his room at the Le Majestic Hotel in Cannes in February 2014, on the pretense of casting her in a movie. Once there, she alleges that Weinstein started massaging her and then groped her breasts and buttocks. According to the suit, Weinstein then trapped her in the bathroom and forced her to masturbate him until he ejaculated on the floor.

During the act, Weinstein allegedly told her, “everything will be taken care of for you if you relax.” [Variety]

Harvey led me into a bedroom — his bedroom — and announced that he wanted to give me a massage. I thought he was joking at first. He was not. For the first time since I met him, I felt unsafe. I panicked a little and thought quickly to offer to give him one instead: It would allow me to be in control physically, to know exactly where his hands were at all times. [NY Times]

On a trip to Los Angeles, she received a schedule from her agents for the hotel meeting with Mr. Weinstein.

There was no reason to suspect anything untoward, because “it’s on the fax, it’s from C.A.A.,” she said, referring to Creative Artists Agency, which represented her.

When Mr. Weinstein tried to massage her and invited her into the bedroom, she immediately left, she said, and remembers feeling stunned as she drove away. “I thought you were my Uncle Harvey,” she recalled thinking, explaining that she had seen him as a mentor. [NYT]

Samantha Panagrosso (model)

At the Cannes Film Festival in 2003:

She says she later refused a dinner invitation but Weinstein came into her cabin. “He pushed me on the bed, tried groping me and I tried to play it off because I thought he’s not going to do anything because my friends are on the boat. But it got very frustrating to get him out. It was like bargaining. When I said ‘no’ he said ‘maybe if I can’t massage you, will you massage me?’ When I said no to that he said ‘come on why are you being so difficult, all the [other] women are ok with it. I don’t see what you are making such a fuss about. Let me see your breasts at least.’” [Variety]

Juliana De Paula (model)

At Weinstein’s SoHo loft in 2007:

Once Weinstein, De Paula and three models were inside the elevator, he began fondling the women’s breasts and making them kiss each other, De Paula said. “Forcing. Like putting both heads together,” she said.

She said the women tried to resist, but were “embarrassed” and unsure of how to fend him off. The elevator opened inside Weinstein’s residence, and he began disrobing. “My [alarm] bells rang,” she said. “It was, oh my gosh, this is not going to be fun at all.”

De Paula said that Weinstein ushered the three models into his bedroom, but she ran into the adjoining bathroom. She heard at least one woman yell “stop” multiple times, but didn’t have a clear view of the bedroom. [LAT]

Zelda Perkins (former London assistant at the Weinstein Company)

At various hotel rooms in 1998:

According to former colleagues, she and several co-workers had been regularly subjected to inappropriate requests or comments in hotel rooms, and she was particularly concerned about the treatment of another woman in the office. She told Mr. Weinstein that he had to stop, according to the former colleagues, and that she would go public or initiate legal action unless he changed his behavior. [NYT]

Vu Thu Phuong (actress and model)

In Vietnam in 2010:

“Everything suddenly turned dark when I saw Mr. Harvey Weinstein standing before me with only a towel around his waist, smiling.”

He asked her if she was ready to star in a few sex scenes because there would be some in the new movie.

“I can teach you, don’t worry. Many stars have also been through this,” Weinstein reassured Phuong, according to her post. “Just treat this as necessary experiences so that you’ll have a stronger foundation in the future.” [Saigoneer]

When I got there, Mr. Weinstein wasted no time. He told me, in front of the publicist and a co-worker beside him, that a famous star, a few years my senior, had once sat across from him in the chair I was in now. Because of his “very close relationship” with this actress, she had gone on to play leading roles and win awards. If he and I had that kind of “close relationship,” I could have a similar career. “That’s how it works,” I remember him telling me. The implication wasn’t subtle. [NYT]

He came back naked in front of me (a horrible view) with a body cream in his hand, kindly asking for a massage. I softly refused, at the beginning it was calm, he kept telling me please please I do not want to have sex, I just want to relax with a massage ... I'm terrified I kept saying no, I can’t do it until I felt an arm pulling me toward the bedroom !!! [Libero Quotidiano]

Tomi-Ann Roberts (former actress, now a psychology professor)

In a New York City hotel room in 1984:

When she arrived, he was nude in the bathtub, she recalled. He told her that she would give a much better audition if she were comfortable “getting naked in front of him,” too, because the character she might play would have a topless scene.

If she could not bare her breasts in private, she would not be able to do it on film, Ms. Roberts recalled Mr. Weinstein saying. … Ms. Roberts remembers apologizing on the way out, telling Mr. Weinstein that she was too prudish to go along. [NYT]

Lisa Rose (former Miramax employee)

At the London Savoy hotel in the late 1980s:

I was sent to the hotel in a taxi. They just said, "you'll work out of the Savoy today". Everyone was so busy, so I just went and did it - I was answering the phone and ordering things, it all felt very normal.

I was alone in the room with him.

He asked me for a back rub, to give him a massage. But I had been forewarned - and I said no. Because of the warning I could really focus on getting out of the situation.

He huffed and puffed and said, "well other people do it".

I moved into a suite room immediately - I could see where the door was from there.

I was really frightened, my heart was beating, and I was thinking, "this is what it's like having so much power - he's a man who's got a lot of power".

He didn't touch me. He said nasty things but he didn't touch me. [BBC]

He wasn't being outright violent with me, he wasn't holding me down, he was just making a move and I didn't want it. So he settled for - how about you just give me a massage ... And that seemed the least offensive way for me to get out of the room. So I literally massaged his shoulders in order to get out.

And I left feeling very disgusted and confused, but I felt so implicit in this happening. [CBC]

“Come here, come on, cut it out, what are you doing, come here,” she remembered him saying. She tried to be assertive. “This is not happening,” she told him. “You’ve got to go. You have to leave. Get out of my apartment.”

Then Weinstein grabbed her, she said. “He shoved me onto the bed, and he got on top of me.” Sciorra struggled. “I kicked and I yelled,” she said, but Weinstein locked her arms over her head with one hand and forced sexual intercourse on her. “When he was done, he ejaculated on my leg, and on my nightgown.” It was a family heirloom, handed down from relatives in Italy and embroidered in white cotton. “He said, ‘I have impeccable timing,’ and then he said, ‘This is for you.’” Sciorra paused. “And then he attempted to perform oral sex on me. And I struggled, but I had very little strength left in me.” Sciorra said that her body started to shake violently. “I think, in a way, that’s what made him leave, because it looked like I was having a seizure or something.” [New Yorker, 10/27]

I was called by another assistant of his asking me to go to his hotel room. It’s like the Ashley Judd situation. He wanted to discuss the script. I was like, “I really don’t feel comfortable with this. Can we meet on the set tomorrow? In my trailer?” ... I was told, “It’s not going to be a long meeting.”

...I went to his room. Immediately he had drinks. The script was on the kitchen counter. He was in his robe. He’s like, “Would you give me a massage?” The whole thing. I said, “Harvey, I’m here to discuss the script. I’m not going to give you a massage or any of that.”

... He said, “Well, you’re not going to leave until you kiss me.” I remember that’s when it turned from “Oh, ha ha, I can handle this guy” to “Well, OK, he’s blocking the door” ... He literally would not let me leave. I said fine and kissed him on the lips. He sort of held my head and made me kiss him, and then he’s like, “OK, you can go now. That’s all I wanted. Just do what I say and you can get your way.” [Huffington Post]

He invited me to come to his hotel room for a drink. We went up together. It was hard to say no because he’s so powerful. All the girls are scared of him. Soon, his assistant left and it was just the two of us. That’s the moment where he started losing control.

We were talking on the sofa when he suddenly jumped on me and tried to kiss me. I had to defend myself. He’s big and fat, so I had to be forceful to resist him. I left his room, thoroughly disgusted. I wasn’t afraid of him, though. Because I knew what kind of man he was all along. [Guardian]

Lauren Sivan (reporter)

At New York City’s Cipriani club in 2007:

Once they left, Sivan says Weinstein leaned in and tried to kiss her. Sivan rejected that attempt and told him she had a long-term boyfriend. Weinstein then said to Sivan, “Well, can you just stand there and shut up.”

At this point, Weinstein and Sivan were in a vestibule between the kitchen and bathrooms. The only way for Sivan to get away from Weinstein required her to get past him and go through the kitchen. Sivan says she was trapped by Weinstein’s body and was intimidated.

Weinstein then proceeded to expose himself to Sivan and began to masturbate ... Sivan says Weinstein ejaculated quickly into a potted plant that was in the vestibule and then proceeded to zip up his pants and they walked back into the kitchen. [Huffington Post]

In his suite, she said, he asked her for a massage. She tried to laugh it off, saying, “I’m not very good at massages.” She said he then began masturbating in front of her. (Skidmore’s mother confirmed that her daughter told her about the incident at the time; Geiss made an almost identical claim). And after he finished, while Skidmore sat in shock, Weinstein told her nonchalantly that he’d like her to write a pilot for him. [Washington Post]

... she found herself in a hotel room with Weinstein, who produced the movie she was there to promote, “Mighty Aphrodite,” for which she later won an Academy Award. “He started massaging my shoulders, which made me very uncomfortable, and then tried to get more physical, sort of chasing me around,” she recalled. She scrambled for ways to ward him off, telling him it was against her religion to date married men. (At the time, Weinstein was married to Eve Chilton, a former assistant.) Then she left the room. [New Yorker]

That night I was offered the role, and I went out to a premiere after party that Harvey Weinstein was also at. He motioned for me to come over to him, and then grabbed me to sit me on his lap. I was so surprised and shocked I couldn’t stop laughing because it was so awkward. But then I could feel that he had an erection. I got quiet, but got off his lap quickly. He then asked me to come outside with him and other things I don’t want to share, but it was implied that if I did not comply with doing what he asked me to do that I would not get the role that I had already been informally offered. [Variety]

Paula Wachowiak (former production assistant)

At a Buffalo hotel in 1980:

One day, the auditor asked her to take a bunch of checks in a manila folder to Weinstein's hotel room to get them signed.

"When I got to Weinstein’s room he let me in but he was behind the door when it opened," Wachowiak wrote. "When I got into the room I realized that he was holding a hand towel around his waist."

She could tell Weinstein was naked underneath the small towel that was barely covering him, Wachowiak said in both the email and the interview.

Nervous about appearing unsophisticated, Wachowiak tried to keep her cool. She told herself: "Relax, these are movie people, they think nothing of walking around naked. Just keep your eyes on his face and don’t look down. And for God sake don’t let on that you want to run out of the room screaming.”

Wachowiak said Weinstein took the folder and dropped the towel. He was naked. She said she kept her eyes on his face. [Buffalo News]

Wende Walsh (former waitress)

In Buffalo, New York in 1979 or 1980:

The night Weinstein came into the bar, Walsh said, she waited on him. He stayed until closing time – 4 a.m. – and then started begging her for a ride to his car, Walsh said.

Walsh usually parked on Forest Avenue, around the corner from the bar, and she said Weinstein followed her and continued to plead with her to give him a ride.

"He got in the car," Walsh said. "He exposed himself. He was trying to push my head into his lap.... I was mortified. It was 4 a.m. and people were going to their cars."

Walsh said she told him "no" repeatedly, but she said he persisted.

"He was a guy who wouldn't take no for answer," she said.

Weinstein forced her to perform oral sex, Walsh said. She can't remember if he got out of the car or she drove him somewhere. She just remembered wanting him to go away. [Buffalo News]

Paula Williams (former model)

At Weinstein’s Hollywood home in 1989:

I walk in and it’s just Harvey. He immediately starts massaging my neck. I heard him open a bottle of champagne. I don’t think I even had a sip, and he exposed himself. [ABC News]

I personally experienced him pulling his you-know-what out of his pants in order to shock me. My basic response was, ‘You know, Harvey, I don’t really think you should be pulling that thing out, it’s not very pretty,” and then leaving, and then never having another meeting with that guy again, because it was like, ‘What on earth?' [Dudley and Bob with Matt Show]

There is also data that suggests Jones simply got much more of his base out to the polls than Moore did. Jones got about 92 percent of the raw vote total that Hillary Clinton did in 2016 in Alabama’s general election, while Moore got about 49 percent of the raw vote total that Donald Trump did in the state.

And this happened despite concerns about voter suppression efforts due to Alabama’s strict voter ID law and voting restrictions for people with felony records, both of which disproportionately impact black voters.

It’s too early to say decisively how Jones pulled this off over Moore. For example, did depressed white turnout play the defining role, or was it increased black turnout? Exit polls are simply not reliable enough to make these kinds of sweeping judgments. With more and better data, statisticians and researchers will wonk this out over the next few days, weeks, and months.

But one thing we do know for certain is that unique aspects of Jones and Moore as candidates, as well as the national political climate, made an outcome in which Jones triumphs with black voters fairly likely all along.

Moore’s slavery-friendly remarks resurfaced in the last few days

Black voters have, in general, heavily favored Democrats for decades now. But Moore was also a uniquely bad candidate for black voters.

For one, Moore was mired by bizarre comments over the last few days of the campaign in which he seemed to endorse or at least tolerate slavery.

First, comments resurfaced in which Moore appeared to say that the US should be more like it was during slavery. Asked by a black man at a September campaign rally what Trump means when he says “make America great again,” Moore at first acknowledged the US’s history of racial tensions. Then he said, “I think it was great at the time when families were united — even though we had slavery. They cared for one another. People were strong in the families. Our families were strong. Our country had a direction.” He later added that he was focused on culture, not policy, in his remarks.

Then Andrew Kaczynski at CNN uncovered 2011 remarks in which Moore responded positively to a radio host’s comment that all constitutional amendments after the 10th should be abolished. Moore said, “That would eliminate many problems. You know, people don’t understand how some of these amendments have completely tried to wreck the form of government that our forefathers intended.”

Among those amendments: the 13th abolished slavery, the 14th guarantees equal protection under the law (and was central to US Supreme Court cases that supported racial integration in public education and ended states’ bans on interracial marriage), the 15th protects black voting rights, and the 19th gave women the right to vote.

So you had two newly resurfaced comments that could be interpreted, at least in part, as fondly recalling the days of slavery.

Moore’s campaign of course strenuously denied this, telling me at one point that such an interpretation of his comments was “recklessly malicious.”

But when your candidate’s comments can be interpreted as anything remotely close to pro-slavery or slavery-tolerant, you have a big problem on your hands.

That’s especially true since Moore already had a history of racially insensitive and bigoted remarks, previously invoking the racist birther conspiracy theory by questioning if President Barack Obama was born in the US and comparing the US Supreme Court decision legalizing same-sex marriage to the 1857 decision that effectively denied black people citizenship.

Combined, this gave black voters a very clear choice: On one hand, you have a guy who seems okay with slavery. On the other hand, you have a guy who prosecuted the KKK.

The national political climate probably helped Jones too

The broader context here matters as well. While the Senate campaign went on, we were in the middle of a national political climate that has taken a frighteningly racist turn.

President Donald Trump himself has a long history of racist remarks. He launched his modern political career by promoting the racist birther conspiracy theory — an idea that he is still reportedly promoting in private. As a candidate for president, Trump also made all sorts of racist comments — suggesting that Mexican immigrants are criminals and rapists, proposing a ban on all Muslims entering the US, saying a US judge should recuse himself from a case simply because of his Mexican heritage, and deploying dog whistles about “law and order.”

All of this boiled over in August, when white nationalists, neo-Nazis, and KKK members descended on Charlottesville, Virginia, to protest the city taking down Confederate statutes. The protests quickly turned violent as the white supremacists faced off with counterprotesters who showed up to demonstrate against racism. That day, a Nazi sympathizer rammed his car into a crowd of counterprotesters — injuring dozens and killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer.

Trump’s response to all of this? He blamed both sides. “I think there is blame … on both sides,” he told reporters days after the protests. “I have no doubt about it. You don’t have a doubt about it either. If you reported it accurately, you would say that.”

As the head of the Republican Party, Trump was morally equivocating between literal white supremacists and anti-racism protesters.

This is the broader context in which Jones won and Moore lost. On top of Jones’s and Moore’s own unique qualities, the Republican Party as a whole has, due to Trump, been tied to outright racism. It is no wonder black voters would turn out against Moore and for Jones in this political climate.

Couple that motivation for higher black turnout with the allegations against Moore that he sexually abused teenagers, which almost certainly depressed turnout among Republicans in Alabama while pushing Democrats to get out to vote.

That’s how you get a situation in which the newest of two senators representing one of the most conservative states in the country will be a Democrat.

Smith also said she will run for Franken’s Senate seat during the next year’s special election, bucking expectations that she would serve as a placeholder candidate and sit out the 2018 race.

“I accept this appointment and it will be my great honor to serve Minnesota as US senator,” Smith said. “Though I never anticipated this moment, I will do everything I can to move Minnesota forward.”

Smith has a number of attributes that make her a good prospect for Democrats. She’s a woman and a high-profile and active member of Dayton’s administration. Serving as lieutenant governor was Smith’s first turn in elected office, but she’s a longtime political operative in Minnesota — she became Dayton’s lieutenant governor after serving as his chief of staff for years.

Dayton and Smith have been colleagues for many years, which Dayton said made his choice for Franken’s replacement easier.

“She’s extremely intelligent, quick to learn and is always open to other’s views,” Dayton said. “She will be a senator that all Minnesotans can be proud of.”

As Franken resigned after allegations of sexual harassment from eight women, there was a lot of speculation that Dayton would be pressured to find a woman to fill his spot. As the governor’s Wednesday press conference continued, one reporter asked Dayton whether he felt uneasy being in the position of being a “kingmaker.”

Dayton paused.

“Well … queenmaker,” he said.

Smith confirmed she will run in 2018

Smith confirmed an important detail during Wednesday’s announcement: She will run during the 2018 special Senate election to replace Franken.

“I will run in that election, and I will do my best to earn Minnesotans’ support,” she said.

Besides Smith, there are other names floating as potential Democratic candidates for the Senate seat in 2018. These include current Democratic Reps. Tim Walz and Keith Ellison of Minnesota, neither of whom have said publicly whether they will run. They’d now have to face Smith, the sitting senator, in a primary.

Walz is one of the leading Democratic candidates for governor. Meanwhile, Ellison is a high-profile progressive politician who currently serves as vice chair of the Democratic National Committee.

An Ellison aide said that the Congress member is considering a 2018 run for Franken’s seat. Meanwhile, Politico reported last week that the National Nurses United union was pressuring Dayton to name Ellison as Franken’s replacement.

During today’s press conference, Dayton said he had spoken with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), who had advised him to choose someone who could run in 2018.

“Tina’s decision to run for the seat next year is her decision,” Dayton added.

Even before Franken’s resignation, 2018 was going to be a contentious year for Minnesota Democrats, according to Democratic Farmer Labor Party Chair Ken Martin.

“Absent the news today, Minnesota was already in the crosshairs,” Martin said in an interview. “Minnesota was already at the epicenter of the national political landscape, and now you throw on a nationally competitive Senate race.”

Franken wasn’t up for reelection until 2020, but now there may be an open race for his seat (which he won by just over 300 votes in 2008). Franken’s Democratic colleague from Minnesota, Sen. Amy Klobuchar, is up for reelection as well. And with Dayton’s term ending and no immediate successor lined up, Republicans are sure to challenge all Democrats for all three positions.

“This presents a major opportunity for Republicans in Minnesota,” GOP operative Brian McClung told Politico. “Republicans here are going to be energized by the chance to replace Al Franken.”

Martin called Franken a friend and said his loss will be felt in Minnesota and in the national political landscape. At the same time, he said he cannot excuse the allegations against Franken and believed the senator resigning was the right action to take.

“I feel absolutely terrible about losing Al Franken in the Senate,” Martin said. “That in no way excuses his behavior to the women that came forward. We believe Sen. Franken made the right decision.”

“It would've been difficult to find anyone more qualified for this job,” he said.

For weeks, conservatives in and out of government have aimed to discredit special counsel Robert Mueller and his investigation into whether or not the Trump campaign colluded with Russia to win the 2016 presidential election. That criticism could potentially pave the way for Trump to demand Mueller’s ouster.

But on Wednesday, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein backed the Mueller probe in an exchange with the House Judiciary Committee’s Ranking Member Jerry Nadler (D-NY) during an oversight hearing.

“If you were ordered today to fire Mr. Mueller, what would you do?” Nadler asked. “I would follow regulation,” Rosenstein replied. “If there were good cause, I would act. If there were no good cause, I would not.”

And when Nadler pushed further, asking if Rosenstein had seen any cause to terminate Mueller, Rosenstein said he had not.

Here’s why that’s important: Rosenstein appointed Mueller as the special counsel in May, and he’s the only one with the authority to fire him. If Trump asked Rosenstein to remove Mueller, Rosenstein could decline to do so. That could potentially lead to a situation where Trump could then fire Rosenstein and replace him with someone who would do Trump’s bidding.

But Rosenstein also told lawmakers during Wednesday’s hearing that no one so far has asked Rosenstein to fire Mueller. And Rosenstein even went so far as to defend Mueller himself, saying, “It would've been difficult to find anyone more qualified for this job.”

Some conservatives want Mueller gone

Rosenstein’s defense won’t make Mueller’s critics happy. There’s a growing conservative effort to remove Mueller, which makes Rosenstein’s comments all the more noteworthy.

“I think the president should’ve fired Mueller long ago,” Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL), one of the leading voices in the push to discredit Mueller, told me in an interview.

Gaetz and his cohort point to perceived corruption and bias in the Mueller probe, including recent texts where a top FBI official who was once part of Mueller’s staff called Trump an “idiot.” They fear the investigation is actually aimed at removing Trump instead of dispassionately gathering facts.

But the timing of the anti-Mueller push is not coincidental. It comes as the special counsel appears to be closing in on Trump’s inner circle. Mueller has already charged four people — two of whom pleaded guilty, including former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn. Multiple reports suggest Trump’s son-in-law and top adviser Jared Kushner could be the next target. Plus, it appears Mueller is building a case that Trump himself may have obstructed justice.

So Rosenstein’s defense comes at an opportune time for Mueller — but it’s doubtful it will satisfy Mueller’s most vocal critics.

How local Alabama activists and the Democratic Party joined forces to elect Doug Jones.

For the past four months, Birmingham City Councilor Sheila Tyson and other local activists were going door to door in Alabama, encouraging people to vote in Tuesday’s special election for Senate.

Speaking by phone Tuesday, Tyson said she had feared the grassroots push to get out black votes wouldn’t work. She had assumed some people would forget, or just stay home. But then, she saw the long lines forming at polling places around her city and car after car pulling up to go vote.

“I’m not worried anymore,” Tyson said. “The lines have been long, the parking lots jam-packed. These African-American communities are turning up, and they are turning out.”

Alabama’s black voters have been credited with delivering a historic win to Doug Jones, the first Democrat to win a Senate seat in deeply red Alabama in the past 25 years.

Exit polls estimated black voters made up about 30 percent of the overall state turnout Tuesday night, edging higher than their participation in either the 2008 or 2012 presidential elections, when Barack Obama was on the ballot. Black voters went overwhelmingly for Jones, while far fewer white Trump voters appear to have turned out for Moore.

“If Jones prevails, as looks increasingly likely, a major reason would be that the black share of Alabama vote is way up vs. past elections,” elections analyst Dave Wasserman tweeted on Election Night.

Those on the ground said that polarized politics in the age of Trump are energizing Democratic voters in Alabama in a way they haven’t been energized in years.

“It’s almost like Trump has shaken the life back into us,” said Catrena Norris Carter, the founder and president of Women of Will, an organization encouraging female leaders to run for office in Alabama.

Facing a Republican candidate like Moore was extra incentive. Even before Moore was embroiled in a sexual misconduct scandal, he was known for his fundamentalist and far-right Christian views on same-sex marriage and abortion — as well as his opposition to Muslims serving in government and his belief that portions of the country are already under Sharia law. Moore also drew criticism for talking about America’s history of racial tension, and saying he thought the country was “strong” and “united” in past centuries, “even though we had slavery.”

Tyson knocked on doors in both white and black communities around the state as part of the get out the vote efforts. She said that while many of the white voters she talked to were more inclined to vote for Moore, Alabama’s black voters were having none of it.

“When we go to the black area it’s totally different,” she said. “They’re letting him have it. The last month, people have gone slap crazy about going to vote. They are just energized.”

“Vote or Die”

Tuesday night’s win was a product of months of organizing and planning. It was the result of an effort between local grassroots activists, the national Democratic Party, and outside progressive groups.

The Alabama senate race dominated the national headlines, but organizers said black voters they spoke to were just as energized about local issues including an oppressively low state minimum wage, increasingly segregated schools, and rural hospitals closing in majority-black areas.

Carter was one of the organizers of a state get out the vote campaign called “Vote or Die” targeting voters in Alabama’s so-called “Black Belt,” which stretches across the middle of the state.

“It’s not extreme, it’s what is going to happen,” Carter said of the campaign’s slogan.

“It literally is the death of a lot of issues that affect us directly,” she added. “If we don’t vote, if we do allow (in) a Republican, specifically an extremist like Roy Moore, it's the death of health care, it’s the death of women’s rights.”

Carter, Tyson and others went door to door in cities and rural areas alike, including impoverished places where voters didn’t have television or internet, to tell them in person how to get to the polls. They said they encountered voters who weren’t even aware the election was being held on Tuesday.

“If you’re aware of the state of poor, rural black and brown folk, they are so concentrated on their next meal and keeping the lights on,” Carter said. “They’re not plugged into the matrix of it all because they are focused on their day to day struggle.”

For once, the national Democratic Party was an active presence in Alabama

For the first time in years, local organizers had an ally in the national Democratic Party, usually absent in past Alabama elections. The Democratic National Committee and its other fundraising arms normally largely sit out elections in deeply Southern states like Alabama that are dominated by Republicans.

“We usually get nothing,” Carter said. “Unfortunately, they have deemed all of us red states. Even with Obama, even with Hillary, there were very few resources that were sent down. When they’re on the campaign trails, they don’t stop in Alabama.”

But when Moore’s campaign became marred by allegations of child molestation and accusations that he pursued sexual relationships with young teenage girls when he was in his 30s, the Democratic Party jumped at the chance to help Jones flip the Senate seat.

The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee jumped into action, helping to mobilize field teams on the ground in recent weeks.

Even as Moore dominated the national headlines, increased campaign contributions from Democrats, Super PACs, and small donors alike helped Jones blanket the airwaves with campaign ads up to Election Day. In fact, Jones raised $11.5 million in individual contributions since May — more than double the $5.2 million raised by Moore, according to federal campaign finance data. Of that, $3.9 million came from people in Alabama, compared to the $771,202 Moore raised.

Jones was also backed by progressive groups like MoveOn.org, Democracy for America, and the League of Conservation voters. Together, the three groups helped raised more than $600,000 for the Democratic candidate.

Tyson and Carter took notice of the attention and cash suddenly being showered on their state. And they said the Democratic Party needs to take Jones’s win as a lesson to expand their reach into traditionally conservative states.

“I think the party needs to do a better job of engaging,” Carter said. “We weren’t always red states. It could very easily flip back over, but it’s going to take work on the ground.”

Some election observers cautioned not to put too much stock in the 2017 Senate race changing the course of Alabama politics, adding that Democrats benefited heavily from running against such a flawed Republican candidate who was disavowed by many in his own party.

Alabama “is among the most solidly republican states in the country,” said George Hawley, assistant professor of political science at the University of Alabama. “I would say the Democrats actually put a real effort in this year as opposed to other years where they’re doing it to say they contested an election. I don’t think this fundamentally signals very much about the future of politics in Alabama.”

But they say it’s going to take work to build a coalition of black and white Democrats in a state deeply polarized by race, class, and, often, political party. While black voters helped Jones win, organizers said black voters aren’t enough to sustain Democratic energy into future elections.

“A significant part of the (state) Democratic Party is black, but the reality is you cannot win a state election with just black votes,” said John Zippert, the co-founder of local newspaper the Greene County Democrat and a Vote or Die organizer. “We’re not running individually any more, we’re running as a party. We want to bring Alabama into the 21st century.”

Carter was similarly optimistic about Alabama’s Democratic Party expanding after Tuesday night’s win.

“Let’s hope that this race pumps some energy back into the party and brings particularly more white Democrats back to the party.”

“Rock bottom is no impediment for a new president who can always find room for a new low.”

USA Today’s editorial board had some scathing words on President Donald Trump Tuesday: He is a “uniquely awful” figure whose “sickening behavior is corrosive to the enterprise of a shared governance based on common values and the consent of the governed.”

It is perhaps the most epic editorial Trump takedown of 2017 — and from a publication that has traditionally treaded lightly in politics.

“A president who would all but call Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand a whore is not fit to clean the toilets in the Barack Obama Presidential Library or to shine the shoes of George W. Bush,” the editorial board wrote, referring to Trump’s Tuesday morning tweet saying that the New York Democrat “would do anything” for campaign contributions.

Lightweight Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, a total flunky for Chuck Schumer and someone who would come to my office “begging” for campaign contributions not so long ago (and would do anything for them), is now in the ring fighting against Trump. Very disloyal to Bill & Crooked-USED!

The White House has attempted to downplay the heavy sexist undertones of Trump’s attack. White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders on Tuesday said that “only if your mind is in the gutter” would one have read sexual connotations into his tweet.

“The president’s words were deliberate,” USA Today wrote. “He pours the gasoline of sexist language and lights the match gleefully knowing how it will burst into flame in a country reeling from the #MeToo moment.”

Gillibrand in an interview with the Today showon Wednesday said she had the same read. “It was certainly just a sexist smear intended to silence me,” she said.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) on Tuesday slammed Trump on Twitter for his attempt to “bully” and “slut-shame” Gillibrand.

Most of USA Today’s editorials, which represent the official viewpoint of the newspaper’s editorial board, are coupled with an opposing view. The paper’s anti-Trump editorial was accompanied by one from Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel. She called the Democrats’ response to Trump’s Gillibrand tweet “laughable.”

Beyond Trump’s overt sexism, the USA Today editorial board also listed other examples of the “unique awfulness” of the Trump era. They cited his support for Alabama’s failed Republican senatorial candidate Roy Moore, who faced multiple allegations of sexual misconduct, including against teenagers; his hundreds of lies while in office; and his failure to fill dozens of government positions. They also hit his refusal to release his tax returns under the “absurd excuse” that he is under audit, and his ethics-breaking business entanglements.

Trump takes advantage of any occasion “to stir racial, religious, or ethnic strife,” the board wrote, noting his exploitation of Monday’s attempted terrorist attack in New York City to tout his anti-immigration policies and his equivocal reaction to racist violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, this summer.

And, they warned, it will only get worse. “Rock bottom is no impediment for a new president who can always find room for a new low,” they wrote.

USA Today isn’t the most obvious place to take a stand on Trump. And yet here we are.

USA Today, which is owned by the newspaper publisher Gannett, has a reputation as a middle-of-the-road national publication that you’re likely to find sitting outside your hotel room door in the morning. While it is one of the most popular newspapers in the United States, it is not known for taking major political stances.

But Trump has pushed the publication further into politics.

In September 2016, USA Today’s editorial board called Trump “unfit” for the presidency. “By all means vote, just not for Donald Trump,” they wrote. Though the board stopped short of making a full-throated endorsement of Hillary Clinton, its anti-Trump stance marked the first time in the paper’s 34-year history that its editorial board took a side in a presidential race.

USA Today has an audience of nearly 3 million people, according to statistics provided by the paper, and its readership is 57 percent men, 43 percent women.

That is potentially millions of people, many of them presumably Trump voters, who this week will be reading a historically apolitical paper say it is a “shock that only six Democratic senators are calling for our unstable president to resign,” and concluding:

The nation doesn’t seek nor expect perfect presidents, and some have certainly been deeply flawed. But a president who shows such disrespect for the truth, for ethics, for the basic duties of the job and for decency toward others fails at the very essence of what has always made America great.

To those who follow such things, this week’s internet backlash looks oddly familiar. Keaton Jones, a boy from Knoxville, Tennessee, went viral earlier this week when he tearfully protested the unkindness of school bullies in a video his mom shared online. As celebrities lined up to commiserate with him, offering him perks like a trip to the next Avengers premiere, skeptics dug a little deeper into the situation and realized Keaton’s family was kinda racist.

Keaton’s swift viral rise and subsequent fall is one we’ve seen before in the age of social media, and in the past year or so in particular. We’ve seen it so often, in fact, that there’s a name for it, one as confusing as the phenomenon itself: Milkshake Duck.

What is a Milkshake Duck?

What isn’t a Milkshake Duck might be the better question.

The concept of a Milkshake Duck was born in summer of 2016, via this particularly observant tweet from popular Twitter user Ben Ward, a.k.a. @pixelatedboat:

The whole internet loves Milkshake Duck, a lovely duck that drinks milkshakes! *5 seconds later* We regret to inform you the duck is racist

The “Milkshake Duck” tweet hung out for a while, steadily accruing hearts, but then got a big boost exactly a year after its invention, when the developer of a buzzy new game was revealed to have been a Gamergate supporter. The gaming community began to refer to the developer as a “Milkshake Duck,” and a meme was born.

Then there’s Gary from Chicago, who was an Oscar-night darling in early 2017, until the media skewered him the next day for having a criminal record.

Or perhaps you were a fan of the Tripps, the super-romantic couple who went viral this summer for their proudly body-positive comments — until a closer look at their social media dug up a number of racist and transphobic remarks.

the whole internet loves thick milkshake duck, the duck that's not afraid to admit that it loves a thick milkshake*five seconds later*: pic.twitter.com/Ft91257mXu

So a Milkshake Duck is just a problematic fave?

Sort of. The saying “your fave is problematic” is a Tumblr-born phrase that captures our loss of faith in our heroes over time, as we grow and evolve and they don’t always say or do the right things, and sometimes turn into creatures we don’t recognize.

The Milkshake Duck is more about instant virality in the age of social media, as well as the growing polarization of publicly professed ideologies. The viral component means anyone can become a public figure overnight — but it also means an increased likelihood of discovering that a new favorite has a checkered past. The phrase implies a sort of grim recognition: Everyone’s said and done stupid shit on the internet, and thus anyone could become a Milkshake Duck at any moment.

The Milkshake Duck, then, is probably more accurately 2017’s version of “this is why we can’t have nice things.” The idea has become so prominent over the last six months or so that it’s now possible to talk about preemptive Milkshake Ducking (yes, you can use it as a verb now):

The increased prominence of the “Milkshake Duck” over the past year seems to speak to our increasingly polarized culture, where moments of unity are vanishingly rare. The phrase seems perfectly attuned to a year that has been defined for many by the idea that nothing is safe, that all of your “faves” could be revealed at any moment to have a dark side that fills you with crushing disappointment.

That this very bleak idea is encapsulated in a concept as Dada-ist and ridiculous as a “Milkshake Duck” makes the whole meme a peak example of millennial humor — and thus we shouldn’t overlook the more tongue-in-cheek uses of the phrase as well. After all, part of the ironic fun of “Milkshake Duck” is that it kind of sounds like your worrywart parent who’s showing up to ruin all your fun. It’s all fun and games until someone loses an eye — or a dying bear turns vicious:

we regret to inform you that the starving bear has killed the rescued bunny

The backlash over the Keaton Jones bully video seems to have boosted the phrase up one more notch in the cultural register. But if it hasn’t been on your radar, you’re not alone —in fact, some are deliberately trying to avoid the inevitable:

Don’t expect to be able to escape the Milkshake Duck, however — the whole point of the Milkshake Duck is that it’s coming for us all. We’re only halfway through December: There’s still plenty of time left in the year to unearth 2017’s biggest Milkshake Duck yet.

This week, moviegoers will return to that magical galaxy far, far away when Star Wars: The Last Jedi hits theaters on Friday, December 15.

For Star Wars fanatics, the two-year wait between TheLast Jedi and 2015’s The Force Awakens has been excruciating. Star Wars fans’ fealty to the franchise is well-documented, and they’ve been analyzing every single second of every interview and trailer, positing theories as to what’s going to happen in director Rian Johnson’s new installment and trying to uncover the movie’s biggest mysteries.

But not all of us have the encyclopedic knowledge of Star Wars stans, and two years is plenty of time in which to forget some, or many, of the details of TheForce Awakens. So for those who haven’t been obsessively revisiting the film in preparation for The Last Jedi, here’s a crash course in what the major players were up to when we last saw them.

The First Order is preparing to strike back

Lucasfilm/Disney

Star Wars is, of course, about individual journeys, awakenings, and growing up. But those all happen in the context of a bigger galactic struggle.

In The Force Awakens, we learned that after the galactic civil war some 30 years ago — which served as the basis for the first Star Wars trilogy — the villainous First Order has risen up and wants to get rid of the democratic state currently known as the New Republic. Wary of an all-out war and not fully aware of the threat that the First Order presents, the New Republic is discreetly supporting the Resistance, led by General Leia Organa (Carrie Fisher).

In The Force Awakens, the First Order uses its Starkiller Base to wipe out Hosnian Prime, the capital of the New Republic. Now aware of the immense power of the Starkiller base, the Resistance figures out a way to destroy it and, for the moment, save themselves.

The question going into The Last Jedi isn’t whether the First Order will strike back but what the scope of its vengeance will be. The villains are smarting from defeat, but they, led by the sinister Supreme Leader Snoke (Andy Serkis), will certainly have a plan to strike back with a fury. Everyone — including the Resistance and Organa — knows that this is coming, regardless of whether they’re prepared.

Rey went around the galaxy to find Luke Skywalker

Lucasfilm/Disney

The Force Awakens presented us with two giant mysteries: the current location of Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) and the origin of new protagonist Rey (Daisy Ridley). Sensing the danger that the First Order presents, Organa is looking for her Jedi brother for some help. Thanks to a map assembled by helpful droids BB-8 and R2-D2, Rey finds him on a mountain island called Ahch-To and presents him with a lightsaber.

But from what we see in the Last Jedi trailer, this likely isn’t going to be a sunny meeting, with Skywalker telling Rey, “It’s time for the Jedi to end.”

That’s probably not the way anyone saw this meeting happening, but it’s understandable: Skywalker is still haunted by the betrayal of his apprentice and nephew Ben Solo, a.k.a. Kylo Ren (Adam Driver), the son of Leia and Han Solo (Harrison Ford). Skywalker created a Jedi Academy, trained Solo, and then saw Kylo Ren slaughter all his trainees. Consequently, seeing a future apprentice on his doorstep while dealing with the trauma Solo/Ren inflicted isn’t going to be easy for Skywalker.

With Skywalker meeting Rey, fans are hoping this will give us some insight into Rey’s parentage or origin, and why she’s such a powerful wielder of the Force. The Force Awakens ultimately didn’t tell us all that much about Rey other than that a lot of people, both good and bad, believe she’s powerful and important to the universe — but no one has told us precisely why. Skywalker, a powerful Jedi himself, might know something about her, or perhaps lead her to realize the power she wields. But odds are she’s going to have to save him from his own darkness first.

The Solo family is broken, and so is Chewie

Lucasfilm/Disney

The Force Awakens wasn’t a good chapter for the Solos.

After the end of Return of the Jedi and the galactic civil war, Han Solo and Leia Organa officially acted upon the romance brewing throughout the first Star Wars trilogy. They got married and had Ben, but unfortunately they didn’t live happily ever after.

Their son’s turn to the dark side drove a wedge between the two, with Leia leading the Resistance and Han zipping through space with his trusted wingman Chewbacca. And though The Force Awakens gave us reunions between both Leia and Han and Han and Kylo, it ended with Kylo being the absolute worst and killing his dad while Chewie watched.

Kylo, after killing Han and being bested in combat by Rey, has to report back to Snoke in Last Jedi. That in itself will give us more insight into his character and perhaps some background as to how Snoke rose to power and asserted himself as leader of the First Order.

Leia still has to be the brave face of the Resistance, but also deal with her villainous son and the loss of the love of her life. Complicating that is the question of how the franchise will deal with the death of the irreplaceable Fisher, who died around this time last year. According to interviews, Laura Dern’s character Admiral Holdo will, at least temporarily, lead the Resistance, providing our first glimpse of how Star Wars might proceed without Fisher.

The galaxy’s premier bromance returns

The couple with the most chemistry in The Force Awakens was John Boyega’s Finn, a.k.a. former Stormtrooper FN-2187, and Resistance pilot and BFF to BB-8 Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac). Finn, having a change of heart and existential crisis, saves Poe and crashes on the planet Jakku, where they’re separated. They later reunite in GIF-worthy fashion for the Resistance’s big attempt to destroy the First Order’s Starkiller.

In the middle of that fight, Finn takes on Kylo Ren and is beaten pretty badly. But his sacrifice wakes up something in Rey, who avenges her friend’s defeat.

Finn is currently healing from his injuries in the medical ward. Meanwhile, his bro-friend Poe is a hero after hitting the shot that destroyed the Starkiller. But this victory is probably short-lived, with a bigger battle on the horizon.

When it comes to whether Finn and Poe are going to take their obvious bromance to the next level (assuming Finn wakes up), Isaac himself gave a pretty positive “no” during the promotional tour for The Last Jedi. He told Collider:

What it means to me is that people can see themselves in a hero like this, in a movie like this. Which I love. Not only LGBT but Latinos ... that there's a representation out there for that.

As to actually seeing how that manifests itself in Poe, in this film, that isn't necessarily going to be a clear story point. But as an actor, and for me, I'm very open to those possibly storylines and I don't think it needs to be nailed down in any kind of traditional way.

Essentially, Isaac is happy that his character is a figure of representation for people who don’t necessarily often see themselves on the silver screen, but don’t expect to see any confirmation of those Poe-Finn fan theories in The Last Jedi.

That said, whether or not Poe and Finn find romance or Luke reveals Rey’s past or Leia mourns the love of her life while fighting the First Order, fans will want to see it for themselves. When the movie hits theaters on Friday, December 15, we’ll find out for sure what happens to all of these beloved characters — and can start speculating about their fate in Episode IX.

A brief guide to the visionary director’s earlier work, and how it helped set the stage for his entry into a galaxy far, far away.

When Rian Johnson was announced as the director of The Last Jedi, the eighth Star Wars movie, there was much rejoicing. Johnson is known for his imaginative twists on familiar genres, both in the film world and, on occasion, in the television world too — and his prior work seems to have served him well, with The Last Jedi already pulling in an avalanche of positive reviews.

The director, who will turn 44 two days after The Last Jedi opens in theaters worldwide, has only three feature film credits to his name prior to Star Wars. He graduated from the University of Southern California in 1996 and made several short films (including one called Evil Demon Golfball from Hell!!!, based on Edgar Allan Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart) before attracting attention with his feature debut, Brick,at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival.

Since then, he’s made two more features and directed several of the most highly praised episodes of Breaking Bad (including one of the series’ acclaimed final episodes, “Ozymandias”). Throughout his career, he’s consistently exhibited two special talents: putting new spins on established genres, and doing it without sacrificing attention to characters.

All of Johnson’s past work is well worth a look for new fans (and conveniently able to rent digitally or stream on Netflix). Each of his films — and one of his Breaking Bad episodes — represent building blocks in a career that is now intersecting with the biggest movie franchise of them all.

Brick (2005) was a stunning debut with a clear, exciting vision

The singular, astonishing vision and voice of Johnson’s feature debut instantly established him a writer/director to watch. Johnson wrote the screenplay in 1997, but spent six years getting it funded, and his efforts were totally worth it; the movie won the Special Jury Prize for Originality of Vision at Sundance in 2005 and launched Johnson on a path toward a big career.

Brick is a neo-noir film starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt and set in California — but in a twist, it’s on a high school campus among teenagers. Gordon-Levitt plays Brendan, a teenager who is still pining for his ex-girlfriend Emily (Emilie de Ravin) when she calls him to cryptically ask for help, and then turns up dead.

The film is modeled directly on hardboiled detective stories by authors like Dashiell Hammett and others, and it boasts many of the same plot elements — the lovelorn detective, the femme fatale, the seedy underbelly of an apparently respectable society (in this case, an affluent high school). But the real marvel is the dialogue, which also takes its cues from neo-noir; it sounds at first out of place, and then marvelously perfect, in the voices of the modern-day teenagers reeling off lines like, “No, bulls would gum it. They'd flash their dusty standards at the wide-eyes and probably find some yegg to pin, probably even the right one. But they'd trample the real tracks and scare the real players back into their holes, and if we're doing this I want the whole story. No cops, not for a bit.”

The Brothers Bloom (2008) gave Johnson the chance to work with bigger stars and new genres

Johnson’s follow-up to Brick came three years later with the higher-budget The Brothers Bloom, which he started working on after the 2005 Sundance win. The caper comedy, which stars Rachel Weisz, Adrien Brody, and Mark Ruffalo, premiered at the Toronto Film Festival in September 2008 and opened in theaters the following May, netting solid-but-mixed reviews from critics.

The Brothers Bloom is a classic conman story about a pair of brothers (Ruffalo and Brody) who, after being orphaned at a young age, are now skilled scam artists. One of them wants out of the family business; his brother convinces him to pull off one last job, with the wealthy heiress Penelope Stamp (Weisz) as their target. But the plan, as you might imagine, goes awry.

The Brothers Bloom feels like a more conventional movie than Brick, but it shares one key characteristic with its predecessor: a lively imagination that takes the conventions of a genre and uses them to tell a fresh and unexpected story.

Breaking Bad’s “Fly” (2010) showcased Johnson’s ability to work nimbly within an established world

Johnson directed three episodes of Breaking Bad throughout the show’s run: “Fly” (season three, episode 10); “Fifty-One” (season four, episode five); and “Ozymandias” (season five, episode 14). All three attracted a lot of attention — Johnson earned a Director’s Guild Award for Outstanding Directing for “Fifty-One,” and some have called “Ozymandias” the greatest episode of TV ever.

But it’s “Fly” that’s most unforgettable, even though it received mixed reviews from viewers when it first aired. Walt and Jesse spend most of the hour inside their concealed meth lab, trying to catch a fly that has gotten in, because Walt is certain it will contaminate their extra-pure meth cooking process. The episode plays out more like theater than traditional TV — the interactions between Walt and Jesse as they wait for the bug to enter their trap reveal much about the characters, despite the fact that not much is happening. And Johnson’s hand is especially visible in the episode’s visuals, which occasionally feel surreal and a bit zany; writing at the AV Club, Donna Bowman praised the director’s “unhinged images and bold juxtapositions.” Everything that made Breaking Bad great is on display in this episode, but it feels wholly different from much of the rest of the show.

Looper (2012) let Johnson helm a bigger-budget production while telling a human story

In his most recent film before The Last Jedi, Johnson took on another familiar genre: time-traveling science fiction. He mixed in some of the same neo-noir elements he used in Brick and added a dash of thriller, and the result was something exciting: a movie about a time-traveling contract killer who discovers that his target is ... himself.

Starring Gordon-Levitt, Emily Blunt, and Bruce Willis, Looper found a big audience, ultimately making $176.5 million worldwide against its $30 million budget — a bona fide hit. Critics loved it, too, praising the way it offered a thought-provoking and inventive take on familiar genres without abandoning characters for plot machinations. It earned a 93 percent “fresh” rating at Rotten Tomatoes and the admiration of many, including Lucasfilm head Kathleen Kennedy, who hired him for The Last Jedi.

Johnson’s talent for genre-bending and character development should serve him well for Star Wars

At the time of Looper’s release, Johnson spoke with the Hollywood Reporter about his approach to the film, and his comments serve as a good explanation of both how he thinks about genre and his appreciation for great characters:

Even though [Looper is] a time-travel movie, the pleasure of it doesn't come from the mass of time travel ... I very much wanted it to be a more character-based movie that is more about how these characters dealt with the situation time travel has brought about. So the biggest challenge was figuring out how to not spend the whole movie explaining the rules and figure out how to put it out there in a way that made sense on some intuitive level for the audience; then get past it and deal with the real meat of the story.

That commitment to really considering how a story’s conventions work on the audience, as well as to how his characters must operate and exist within those conventions, makes Johnson a great fit for films in the Star Wars universe, which double as intimate family dramas and action-filled tales of galactic conflict. And Lucasfilm and Disney seem to agree: In early November, ahead of The Last Jedi’s December 15 release, they announced that Johnson will oversee a new trilogy in the Star Wars universe, writing and directing the first episode.

Johnson’s trajectory from independent, small-budget filmmaker to keeper of the biggest franchise in cinema is a heady one. But it’s one that fits well with his vision and plays to his strengths. And it bodes well for the direction of the Star Wars universe, too.

The sheer scale and sustained ferocity of the reckoning with sexual harassment since the Harvey Weinstein revelations have taken almost everyone by surprise. Events have unfolded with such disorienting speed that it’s difficult to find emotional equilibrium — giddy disbelief and nameless dread alternate and sometimes mix.

It was inevitable that the wave of charges would take down some liberal heroes. When the first charges against Sen. Al Franken appeared, it set off a predictable round of anguished debate on the left. New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg has been a key figure — in the wake of the revelations, she wrote a column saying Franken should go, only to second-guess herself the following week.

On Tuesday, academic and activist Zephyr Teachout published a column of her own in the Times, questioning whether Franken has been treated with fairness and proportionality.

Franken’s offenses seem, at the very least, of a different kind than Harvey Weinstein’s, and the proper censure is far from clear. Should Franken resign? Should Democrats allow the Senate ethics investigation to proceed? How should they weigh Franken’s long service of progressive causes, including the rights of women, against his ugly and immature treatment of individual women? How can a zero-tolerance policy be reconciled with due process?

This excruciatingly difficult intra-left debate has played out on dozens of other websites and cable shows — and it’s unlikely to end anytime soon, no matter what happens to Franken.

Both wrestle with the same dilemma: While the left attempts to address this issue in good faith, the right is using it entirely as a tool to divide Democrats and win short-term political advantage. Every move Democrats make to hold their own accountable, to apply the principle without favor, is immediately used against them.

Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images for Hollywood ReporterStill waiting for the right to unite in condemning Bill O’Reilly.

Sensitive debates are difficult under a torrent of bad-faith gaslighting

Conservatives have missed no opportunity to use Franken as a wedge. While he was still in office, they used him to attack Dems. And when he resigned?

“What you saw today was a lynch mob,” Fox News contributor Newt Gingrich said Wednesday on Laura Ingraham's show. The former House speaker argued that Democrats' mind-set is, “Let's just lynch him because when we are done, we will be so pure.”

They pivoted from “Dems are bad for keeping Franken” to “Dems are bad for losing Franken” without breaking a sweat, because the point was never about Franken. The point is always the same: Dems are bad.

So now the left struggles with the dilemma of how to behave honorably under a set of rules and norms that their opponents do not acknowledge or accept.

Anger over that asymmetry is what animates Lithwick’s column. “This is a perfectly transactional moment in governance,” she writes ...

... and what we get in exchange for being good and moral right now is nothing. I’m not saying we should hit pause on #MeToo, or direct any less fury at sexual predators in their every manifestation. But we should understand that while we know that our good faith and reasonableness are virtues, we currently live in a world where it’s also a handicap.

Charles Pierce at Esquire put it more bluntly: “There is no commonly accepted Moral High Ground left to occupy anymore, and to pretend one exists is to live in a masturbatory fantasyland. It’s like lining yourself up behind Miss Manners in a political debate against Machiavelli.”

Amanda Marcotte has argued that booting Franken (and replacing him with a woman) is the smart political move regardless. But even if that’s so in Franken’s case, it surely won’t always be true that the right thing is the politically advantageous thing, especially in the face of a movement seeking to exploit every weakness.

The point is not that the left is pure on sexual harassment, or anything else. Far from it. Everyone faces the temptation to treat friends and enemies differently. But there is debate, struggle, made more difficult by the fact that there is none remaining on the right.

It is genuinely difficult to know how to respond to bad faith. Acting as though rules and norms still apply just seems to make Dems vulnerable, but abandoning them entirely doesn’t sound great either.

I don’t have an answer (maybe there isn’t one). All I can offer is a closer look at the two main tools the right uses to weaken and degrade the norms that hold American public life together. They are familiar from the sexual harassment debate, but many other debates as well.

Paul Morigi/Getty Images for DentonsGaslighter-in-chief.

Whataboutism to show that no one really cares

The first is whataboutism. Even if you haven’t heard the term, you’ll recognize it:

“Trump admitted to sexually assaulting women, and more than a dozen have accused him of it.”

“What about Bill Clinton?”

“The Trump administration is trying to bail out failing coal plants with billions of dollars, to no credible end.”

“What about Solyndra?”

“Republican legislatures in numerous red states are passing laws deliberately designed to reduce voting turnout among Democrats, especially minorities.”

“What about ACORN?”

“Roy Moore is a lunatic creep.”

“What about Al Franken?”

And so on, forever. For any violation of norms or rules, there is a “what about.”

Though it is a response to a moral accusation, it is not really a moral argument at all. Even if you believe the worst and most fevered charges against Bill Clinton, for instance, his behavior cannot justify Trump’s. Nothing Al Franken or Democrats do can justify Roy Moore. Morally, their behavior stands or falls on its own.

The point of whataboutism is not to justify anything — it’s to show that nobody really cares. Nobody really puts principle above tribe. Everyone is out for their own team, and people who pretend otherwise are liars or hypocrites.

“Don't be fooled by any of this,” Sean Hannity said on his show the night Franken resigned. “This Democratic decision today obviously was coordinated, and to turn on Franken, it's purely political.”

In other words, Democrats are faking. They don’t really care about sexual harassment. They’re just out to help their tribe.

Shared norms only exist to the extent people believe they exist. They have only the force we ascribe them. The more people believe that a norm is just a sham, tribal warfare through other means, the more they will behave accordingly. If “everybody does it,” then anybody can do it.

Delegitimizing the referees

The second key tool of tribal morality is to weaken or degrade any claim of authority that transcends tribe — to disqualify any referees with the ability to constrain tribal behavior.

The right has gone after government, journalism, science, and academia in turn, in each case doing at a social scale what whataboutism is meant to do at the individual level: show that all claims of transpartisan authority are fraudulent. The message right-wing media relentlessly delivers to the base is that these institutions are in thrall to the left, that there is only tribe versus tribe, no shared authorities or referees. (I wrote a much longer post about this earlier this year.)

This tool, interestingly, hasn’t worked very well for the right on sexual harassment. Insofar as there is any official authority to discredit, it is the mainstream media that’s breaking the stories. They certainly attack media at every opportunity, but the victims themselves are the real authorities, and there are too many of them, coming from too many directions, to discredit at once. (Though Moore’s campaign tried.)

But the tool is hard at work in other cases. Take Robert Mueller’s investigation of Trump’s ties to Russia. Mueller is, by everyone’s pre-2017 estimation, the very definition of a straight-shooter, an authority trusted on all sides. Here’s what Newt Gingrich had to say back in May:

Robert Mueller is superb choice to be special counsel. His reputation is impeccable for honesty and integrity. Media should now calm down

“Public statements and messaging documents obtained by The New York Times,” Jim Tankersley writes, “show a concerted push by Republican lawmakers to discredit a nonpartisan agency they had long praised.” The JCT was Good until it threatened the tribe; now it’s Bad.

They’ve gone after the mainstream media (“MSM”), the academy, courts, climate science, government agencies — virtually any institution assigned with establishing a shared base of facts or arbitrating factual disputes. A month ago, Trump’s administration released an incredibly detailed account of climate change and its dangers, written by federal climate scientists and researchers. The administration ignored or dismissed it. (See Ezra Klein for more on how deeply intellectual rot has penetrated the GOP.)

The point of all this is to convince a captive right-wing base that the only sources they can trust are partisan conservative sources — that the only other choices are partisan left sources. There are only tribes, no referees, no constraints.

So they can dismiss a series of Washington Post stories on Roy Moore’s creepy history as “fake news,” despite dozens of sources. Federal climate scientists, the CBO, the JCT, the MSM — it’s all fake news. Any bearer of bad news for the tribe is against the tribe and thus can’t be trusted. It’s a closed loop.

Whataboutism and rejection of transpartisan authority translate to a simple message: No one cares about anything but their own tribe, and only our tribe can be trusted.

While the left wrestles with tribalism, the right has given into it completely. And it sure looks like that puts the left at a systematic disadvantage.

Is respecting rules and norms a handicap?

When Obama was president, trying to pass the economic recovery bill and the Affordable Care Act, Republicans took to the press constantly complaining about transparency, due process, and giving lawmakers time to read legislation before they vote on it. The phrase “rammed down our throat” is used with disturbing frequency in reference to the ACA.

But since Trump took office, Congressional Republicans have hastily assembled and attempted to rush through, with virtually no hearings, analysis, or bipartisan outreach, two radical, unpopular bills in the past year.

Okay this is absurd. One page of the new #GOPTaxPlan is crossed out with an ex. Another page is just a line. Is that a crossout? Is this page part of the bill? WHY AM I ASKING THESE QUESTIONS HOURS BEFORE WE VOTE ON IT?? #GOPTaxScampic.twitter.com/57Qbi7gT5F

Their supposed procedural principles were just a tool for partisan advantage, a convenient way to bash Obama and justify total opposition.

Under Obama, Republicans used fears about the deficit as a weapon to oppose any and all spending. Now, they are trying to pass a tax bill that would increase the deficit by more than a trillion dollars, almost entirely for tax cuts on the rich (and then promising, with astonishing chutzpah, to subsequently cut Medicare and Medicaid because of the deficit). Their supposed principles on the deficit were just a tool for partisan advantage.

Under Obama, Republicans were forever crying “executive overreach” and impending tyranny. Now Trump has used his office to enrich himself, he fired Comey (by his own words) to shut down the Russia investigation, and all day long Fox is running authoritarian wish fulfillment like this:

JFC, Jeanine Pirro is calling for the purging, arrest, and prosecution of people at the FBI and DOJ. https://t.co/lCYjBpZTJz

They said they cared about “the swamp,” but they have stood by mutely as the administration packs itself with cronies, lobbyists, and amateurs. They said they cared about family values, but they elected a bullying, misogynistic swindler. They said they cared about sexual harassment, but, well ...

The Latest: Republican National Committee once again supporting Roy Moore, 3 weeks after severing ties over sexual molestation allegations. https://t.co/HYIT7Eby7E

It was all bad faith, the language of principle deployed purely for partisan advantage.

Now they are busy bashing mainstream media errorsthat were, without exception, caught and corrected by the media sources in question. The president is calling for the firing of individual journalists.

.@daveweigel of the Washington Post just admitted that his picture was a FAKE (fraud?) showing an almost empty arena last night for my speech in Pensacola when, in fact, he knew the arena was packed (as shown also on T.V.). FAKE NEWS, he should be fired.

This is Trump, who gets more things wrong before breakfast — literally — than Dave Weigel has in his entire career. According to the (ahem) Washington Post, as of November 13, Trump has made 1,628 “misleading claims” this year alone.

Trump has averaged 5.5 falsehoods per day this year. He’s been on an amazing hot streak lately, up to *9 falsehoods per day* over a month. On pace for about 2,000 in his first year in office. As far as I know, not one firing, apology or correction.https://t.co/UTI0GRMgwp

The right-wing media outlets around which conservatives increasingly huddle — Fox, Breitbart, and Facebook shares of dubious origin — swim in fantasy, paranoia, and conspiracy theories all day, fairy tales about their opponents smuggling guns, having people assassinated, and running child prostitution rings out of pizza restaurants.

They use the principle of accuracy in media as a tool for tribal advantage.

Lies on Breitbart don’t count. Lies on Hannity and Fox & Friends don’t count. Kellyanne Conway’s dissembling doesn’t count. Only the mistakes of people who care about the truth count. These are the rules of decline.

They sense that the language of principle works. They have weaponized it, using it to jam up the other side. (Over email, historian Rick Perlstein, who has chronicled this kind of thing on the right for years, compared it to a hand grenade — they catch it and toss it back.) They know that those who do take norms seriously feel obliged to assume good faith.

But then you end up with a situation in which “only the mistakes of people who care about the truth count.” Racism and sexual harassment only count against people who care about racism and sexual harassment. Carbon emissions only count against people who care about climate change. Partisanship only counts against those open to compromise.

As Goldberg wrote, “Democrats, by and large, want their politicians held accountable. Republicans, by contrast, just want Democratic politicians held accountable.”

It’s a fundamental asymmetry, shaping everything in US politics, but it’s just not clear what mainstream institutions and/or the left should do about it.

Brian Beutler has been arguing for a while that journalists are simply failing to do their job when they take demonstrably bad-faith actors like Steve Bannon or Kellyanne Conway at their word. Enabling them to deliver falsehoods to large audiences, even in the rare instances when the falsehoods are accompanied by rebuttals, does the public a disservice. Treating their contempt for journalists and factual accuracy as normal politics, just the typical spin that both parties engage in, creates the illusion balance where there is none.

“The longer it takes us to develop new norms for addressing demonstrable bad faith,” Beutler writes, “the likelier it becomes that this tide of propaganda will swamp us.”

But as I asked in my post on tribal epistemology, what would those new norms look like? If mainstream journalists assume bad faith on the part of dissemblers on the right, they’re going to lose a lot of guests, sources, and viewers. If right-wingers don’t see their conspiracy theories represented back to them in mainstream news, it will merely hasten their ongoing alienation from mainstream sources of fact and information. Their epistemic closure will only grow more closed.

Despite thousands of hours wasted and many millions of dollars spent, the Democrats have been unable to show any collusion with Russia - so now they are moving on to the false accusations and fabricated stories of women who I don’t know and/or have never met. FAKE NEWS!

In the meantime, Franken is leaving, but recent experience suggests that more women will be coming forward, implicating lawmakers on both sides of the aisle. The left, because it cares (or at least some of it cares) about sexual harassment as such, must navigate its own conflicting impulses and interests to determine what’s fair to everyone — while under a hail of bad-faith fire from those who see it as just one more way to divide and demoralize them.

Time magazine named "the Silence Breakers" its Person of the Year for 2017. These are the women and men who shared their stories of assault, harassment, and hostility and publicly named their alleged abusers. But the story goes beyond the magazine’s cover.

That elbow in the lower right-hand corner is attached to a young hospital worker from Texas, who anonymously reported her harassment for fear of the negative impact it could have on her and her family. It represents a much larger contingent than the women on the cover: the silence keepers.

The Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network (RAINN) studied the underlying reasons people don’t report, and, unsurprisingly, the above statistics are connected. According to RAINN, the No. 1 reason people don’t report their abuse and harassment is because they’re afraid of the repercussions.

Time has made it a point to recognize the courage of the “Silence Breakers,” but it’s important to remember why their actions were brave: because there are far more people remaining silent, who feel that they don’t have the option of speaking up.

To learn more about why women and men do not report harassment and assault, watch the video above and subscribe to our YouTube channel.

But the Alabama secretary of state said it’s “highly unlikely” the outcome will change.

Republican Roy Moore has refused to concede the Alabama Senate special election, telling his supporters to realize “when the vote is this close that it's not over.”

Moore was at least 20,000 votes behind Jones by the end of Tuesday evening, and multiple news outlets called the election for Jones shortly before 10:30 pm Eastern time.

Moore implied that there would be a recount, though it’s not clear exactly what that process entails — or if there will even be one. An automatic recount is only triggered under state law when final vote counts are within half a percentage point.

“We also know that God is always in control,” he said during his election night speech, and then launched into criticism of the media for the way he was portrayed during the campaign. Moore was plagued by sexual misconduct allegations during the election, including the account of one woman who said Moore groped her when she was a 14-year-old minor and he was 32.

“You know, part of the thing — part of the problem with this campaign is we've been painted in an unfavorable and unfaithful light,” Moore told his supporters. “We've been put in a hole, if you will.”

Moore said it reminded him of a passage in Psalms 40:

I waited patiently for the Lord. He inclined to me, heard my cry, brought us out of a horrible pit out of clay and set me feet on the rock and established my goings and put a new song in our mouth. Praise to our God. Many shall see it and hear it and shall be moved by that, if you will.

“That's what we've got to do,” Moore finished, “is wait on God and let this process play out.”

Vox is an American news and opinion website owned by Vox Media. The website was founded in 2014 by Melissa Bell and Ezra Klein. Vox is noted for its concept of explanatory journalism and its use of "card stacks" that define terms and provide context within an article.

Contents

History

Ezra Klein, left The Washington Post in January 2014 for a position with Vox Media, the publishers of the sports website SB Nation, technology website The Verge, and video gaming website Polygon.[2]The New York Times described Vox Media as "a technology company that produces media" rather than its inverse, associated with "Old Media".[2] Klein expected to "improve the technology of news" and build an online platform better equipped for making news understandable.[2] The new site's 20-person staff was chosen for their expertise in topic areas and included Slate'sMatthew Yglesias, Melissa Bell, and Klein's colleagues from The Washington Post.[2][3]

Vox launched in early April 2014 with Klein as its editor-in-chief. His opening editorial essay, "How politics makes us stupid", explained his distress about political polarization in the context of Yale Law School professor Dan Kahan's theories on how people protect themselves from information that conflicts with their core beliefs.[4]

In September 2017, Vox announced that Ezra Klein would be taking a new role as editor-at-large, and that Klein's current deputy, Lauren Williams, would be named editor in chief.[10]

Content

In order to reuse work from authors prior to the relaunch in 2014, Vox creates "card stacks" in bright "canary yellow" that provide context and define terms within an article. The cards are perpetually maintained as a form of "wiki page written by one person with a little attitude".[11] As an example, a card about the term "insurance exchange" may be reused on stories about the Affordable Care Act.[11]

The site uses Vox Media's Chorus content management system, which enables journalists to easily create articles with complex visual effects and transitions, such as photos that change as the reader scrolls.[11] Vox Media's properties target educated households with six-figure incomes and a head of house less than 35 years old.[11]

YouTube

Vox has a YouTube channel by the same name where they have regularly posted videos on news and informational subjects since 2014. These videos are accompanied by an article on their website. The themes covered in the videos are usually similar to the themes covered in the regular, written articles on the website.

The channel has over 3 million subscribers and over 651 million views as of October 2017.[12]

Content surrounds both current affairs, timeline of certain events, and interesting facts.

Reception

In March 2014, before it had officially launched, Vox was criticized by conservative media commentators, including Erick Erickson, for a video it had published.[13]

The website's launch received significant media attention.[14] Websites noted that the launch came around the same time as other data and explainer websites like FiveThirtyEight and the New York Times' The Upshot.[15][16] Vox was described as using "Upworthy" style headlines to enhance shareability and to act as a "Wikipedia for ongoing news stories."[14]

Shortly after it launched, conservative writer David Harsanyi criticized the site's concept of "explanatory journalism" in an article in The Federalist titled "How Vox makes us stupid", arguing that the website selectively chose facts, and that "explanatory journalism" inherently leaves out opposing viewpoints and different perspectives.[17] Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry at The Week argued that the website produced "partisan commentary in question-and-answer disguise" and criticized the site for having a "starting lineup [that] was mostly made up of ideological liberals."[18]The Week's Ryu Spaeth described the site's operations as, "It essentially takes the news (in other words, what is happening in the world at any given moment in time) and frames it in a way that appeals to its young, liberal audience."[19]

The Economist, commenting on Klein's launching essay "How politics makes us stupid," said the website was "bright and promising" and the premise behind the site was "profoundly honourable," and positively compared the site's mission to John Keats's negative capability.[4]

In 2015, the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry presented Julia Belluz the Robert B. Balles Prize for Critical Thinking for her work on Vox. "We need more people in the media doing what Julia Bellux does ..."[22]

Readership

In June 2015, Vox had 54.1 million unique visitors, of which 41% were between the ages of 18 and 34, according to comScore Inc.[23]

In a 2017 Nieman Lab interview, Ezra Klein stated of Vox's audience: "We watch our audience data pretty closely, and our audience data does not show or suggest to us that we are overwhelmingly read on one side or the other of the political sphere, which is good...And overall our audience leans a bit left, but it doesn’t lean overwhelmingly so."[24]